Radio review: Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein

A rainy Sunday afternoon after a fairly quiet week of live theatre is as good a time as any to dip back into the Drama on 3 archive of radio plays on BBC Sounds, and an original play written by Sarah Wooley and directed by Abigail le Fleming. Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein is, as the title gives away, a story all about theatre and particularly the formative years of Broadway musicals, but you'd be right if you suspected that one of the main draws for me was wondering if we'd get to hear Oscar Hammerstein II explain just what attracted him so much to stories whose lead characters have killed a man, honestly it's no big deal why does everyone keep going on about it, who hasn't killed a few people, if anything it's a positive and you should definitely marry off your daughter to him. Sadly this particular bit of psychological insight isn't one we get in what is for the most part a highly sympathetic look at three men who between them largely defined what the Broadway musical was.

Radio review: The Effect

Remember those old BBC sound effect albums? I don't recall there being a "hand job" effect on them but I guess Auntie really does have something for every occasion.

Although I listen to a fair bit of half-hour radio comedy I don't often get round to any full-length drama, but Lucy Prebble's 2012 play The Effect was one of my top shows of that year, and one that I still remember vividly; add a top voice cast for Abigail le Fleming's Radio 3 production and I couldn't resist revisiting it. Lorna (Christine Entwisle) is the doctor in charge of the intensive medical trial of a new antidepressant; she's suffered from depression herself, and is skeptical about the use of drugs to treat it, so she's concerned about the reaction two of the test subjects are having: Connie (Pirate Jessie Buckley) and Tristan (Damien Molony) appear to have fallen very quickly in love with each other. If the development is worrying for the medical team, it's even more so for the pair themselves, their emotions - particularly Connie's - bouncing between elation at a new love, and the horror that one of the strongest things they've ever felt might just be a side-effect.