Radio review: Love and Information

Back to my occasional reviews of radio adaptations of stage work, where BBC Radio 3's recent production of Love and Information is the first audio adaptation, and 12 years seems like a surprisingly long time to wait to give it that treatment: After all, Caryl Churchill's 2012 play is an experiment in form that requires all kinds of resources for a live revival, that are a lot easier to get around on radio, where sketch shows are common. And that's essentially the format Churchill used for this play, whose cast very quickly run their way through more than a hundred characters in over fifty scenes that are rarely as long as two minutes, and can be as short as a single sneeze. As an audience member, one advantage this has is that I was able to focus entirely on the scenes and not the staging - I remember the original production at the Royal Court as being brilliant, but it was impossible not to be slightly distracted by the impressively slick scene changes.

Radio review: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

It's the couple of weeks of calm before the storm when London theatres gear up to grab the attention back from Edinburgh and all launch new shows at once. While they build up to that and I have a rare full week without theatre, as usual I'll top it up with radio and screen adaptations. A few years ago I listened to Radio 3's production of Lucy Prebble's The Effect, which starred Damien Molony and Pirate Jessie Buckley. It seems the two actors made the most of their time in the recording studio as at the same time they played Giovanni and Annabella, the incestuous brother and sister in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. In a play Pauline Harris' audio version sees as a twisted response to Romeo & Juliet, Giovanni seduces Annabella, and they begin an affair that soon leaves her pregnant.

Radio review: The Octoroon

So I guess I'm rounding out 2021 in the same way I started it, making up for a lack of live theatre with screen and radio alternatives. A few years ago American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins scored a hit with An Octoroon, his deconstruction of problematic Victorian melodrama The Octoroon. The play worked in its own right but like, I would imagine, most people, I went into it unfamiliar with what it was deconstructing. It's one thing when the source material is Hamlet, but when it's a play whose then-radical sympathy for black lives now comes across as deeply patronising, it's not exactly revived much. So once again Radio 3 provides an alternative, with a 2013 production in which Mark Ravenhill adapted Dion Boucicault's 1859 play set on a Louisiana cotton plantation, where George (Trevor White) has returned to claim his inheritance.

Radio review: Don Juan

Not for the first time, and to be honest I think it's unlikely to be the last time this year, Covid has caused the show I was due to see tonight to be cancelled. And once again I've turned to BBC radio drama for an alternative, and Robin Brooks' Don Juan, an adaptation of the first few cantos of Lord Byron's epic satirical poem. Byron's version of Juan (Matthew Tennyson) isn't a famed lothario, or at least not yet, but a beautiful but gormless teenager who proves irresistible to all the young women he meets, especially those with husbands or fathers who'd disapprove. So he first catches the eye of neighbour Donna Julia (Pippa Nixon,) unhappily married to a much older man, who seduces Juan and then gets caught with him in a bedroom farce when her husband returns. Juan flees the city and is shipwrecked, and found by Haidée (Dolores Carbonari,) who also falls for him - and this time it's her fearsome pirate father who causes them trouble.

Radio review: The Oresteia - The Furies

When I started listening to and reviewing Radio 3's 2014 Oresteia earlier this week, I suggested a couple of practical reasons why we don't really see theatres staging it as three separate plays, instead usually getting a playwright to create a single epic out of them. Getting to the end of the trilogy, it also suggests how on an artistic and storytelling level it would make quite an unusual experience for modern audiences. Of course one reason the jump from one play to the next is quite jarring is that this production took the idea of treating them as separate plays to its natural conclusion, entrusting each to a different writer. Rebecca Lenkiewicz takes over for The Furies, with Sasha Yevtushenko directing as Orestes (Will Howard,) who was last seen fleeing the titular ancient goddesses because he murdered his mother (in revenge for her murdering his father, in revenge for him murdering their daughter,) arrives at Apollo's temple in Delphi for sanctuary.

Radio review: The Oresteia - The Libation Bearers

I'm continuing to fill this live theatre-free week with the 2014 Radio 3 adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, which saw the cast continue in their roles but the writing and directing duties pass to Ed Hime and Marc Beeby respectively for the middle play in the trilogy, The Libation Bearers. Some years after the murder of Agamemnon, his son Orestes (Will Howard) secretly returns from exile to leave an offering at his father's tomb. There he's reunited with his sister Electra (Joanne Froggatt,) who along with the titular Chorus of slave women (Sheila Reid, Amanda Lawrence, Carys Eleri) is also there to leave a tribute. But this is on the behalf of their mother Clytemnestra (Lesley Sharp,) who's acting in fear after having a prophetic dream - these offerings are a paltry attempt to make up for murdering her husband.

Radio review: The Oresteia - Agamemnon

In the last couple of years when there's been months of theatre downtime I've tried to help replace with BBC Sounds' archive of radio plays, one positive that's come out of it is that I've enjoyed those times when audio drama can do things I'd like to see on stage, but am unlikely ever to because of practical reasons. It could be something like the recent Doctor Faustus, where having John Heffernan play both leading roles for the whole play would technically be possible but probably end up being awkward. Or, as is the case with Aeschylus' Oresteia, a proposition too risky for a venue to programme: Usually heavily edited into a single epic play, it is of course a trilogy of individual tragedies that I've never seen presented on stage separately. Much like Shakespeare's second* Henriad, which even the Globe and RSC tend to ignore as much as humanly possible, it's a big ask to hope audiences will either book in their droves for one part of a larger story, or take a punt on booking an entire trilogy.

Radio review: Doctor Faustus

The last time the RSC tackled Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the concept of the damned scholar and his demon servant as a two sides of the same coin was played with by having two actors alternate the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles, with both actors and audience only finding out who would play whom at the start of the performance. Radio is a medium that allows for the idea to be taken easily to the next conclusion, so adaptor/director Emma Harding gives us hot Heff-on-Heff action: John Heffernan plays both roles in this recent Radio 3 broadcast. Faustus is a Wittenberg scholar frustrated by the limits of human knowledge found in the approved books; he expands his horizons to forbidden tomes on demonology, and manages to summon Mephistopheles. Despite the demon himself warning him against it, Faustus signs a contract to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for 24 years of Mephistopheles giving him any knowledge and power he desires.

Radio review: Othello

Nowadays the title character of Othello is pretty much universally seen as being a black man (and given some of the specific racist language in the play, I tend to agree that's probably what Shakespeare had in mind,) but the word "Moor" was pretty loosely defined at the time, and as well as Africans could encompass anyone Middle-Eastern or Muslim. This is the angle Emma Harding takes for another of her very specific, modern day Shakespeare adaptations, which first aired on Radio 3 in 2020: Othello (Khalid Abdalla) is a Muslim who converted to Christianity, his military skill seeing him quickly rise to the position of General in the Venetian army. Not previously romantically inclined, he's just eloped with the young noblewoman Desdemona (Cassie Layton) when he's given an urgent command: Turkey has sent forces in to recapture Cyprus, and Othello must lead the counterattack.

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 Merchant of Venice

Despite the theatres gradually reopening this will still end up being a very Shakespeare-light year for me, so it's as good a time as any to catch up on a few more of the recent audio adaptations from Radio 3, which remain available on BBC Sounds under the Shakespeare Sessions strand. It's not a particular favourite of mine but it's been a few years since my last Merchant of Venice and the casting for Emma Harding's 2018 production is intriguing, notably that of Andrew Scott as Shylock. Harding has set the story in the City of London during the 2008 financial crash, and to open with a sidebar, I was once interviewed for a theatre job by someone who supposedly specialised in "authentic" Shakespeare, who grumbled a lot about a modern-dress RSC production of this play, saying it was impossible to set it post-Holocaust. Unless you base your interpretation entirely on the fact that the play's antisemitism is openly state-sanctioned (and I've talked elsewhere about my feelings on defining an entire production by one line or scene,) that seems either a naïvely sunny view of modern tolerance, or more likely a restrictively literal-minded approach to theatre: In the years leading up to that particular crash Jews might not have been the bogeyman of choice, but the post-9/11 world wasn't exactly shy about demonising one group of people.

Radio review: Lights Up - The Meaning of Zong

Another BBC Lights Up instalment to make it to radio rather than TV, actor Giles Terera's playwrighting debut has an epic scope and emotional intimacy that would, between them, have made trying to film it using social distancing difficult. Helped by Jon Nicholls' sound design, The Meaning of Zong finds a natural home as an audio drama that can conjure up some of the bleakest crimes of British history along with triumphs (am I saying that radio is closer to theatre than film or TV are in how much of the work the audience's imagination has to do? Maybe I am.) It's a topical story, especially given that Tom Morris' production was commissioned for Bristol Old Vic, a city at the centre of the ongoing argument about Imperial Britain's racist and oppressive heart, and the loud voices that insist any attempt to reveal the truth about history is the same as erasing it. This is alluded to in a present-day framing device in which Rachel (Moronke Akinola) has an argument with a bookshop manager over a book about the slave trade being displayed in the African, rather than British, history section.

Radio review: The Likes of Us

After another week of staring at screens all day a radio play sometimes feels like the order of the day, this time a dip into the recent archive of Radio 3's drama strand, courtesy of the great Roy Williams: The Likes of Us premiered in February last year but has remained available on BBC Sounds. As mentioned by the playwright himself in his introduction, it was inspired by the Grenfell Tower fire, an event that provides both a framing device and a couple of crucial plot points in the life story of a woman loosely based on Williams' own mother. We first meet Gloria (Doreene Blackstock) through the prism of her daughter Sharon (Clare Perkins,) a teacher who's been tasked with writing her mother's eulogy. Having always had a combative relationship with her mother she finds this difficult, but takes some inspiration when she discovers Gloria kept secret diaries. These describe, as she would have expected, her arrival from Jamaica as part of the Windrush Generation, the racism she experienced, and the deterioration of her relationship with her husband (Steve Toussaint,) in part as a result of those experiences, in part because of his many affairs.

Radio review: Folk

A break from theatre rescued from pandemic obscurity by BBC TV, for some theatre rescued from pandemic obscurity by BBC radio: Folk had been commissioned by Hampstead Theatre and was presumably due to have been staged by now, but instead it gets an audio outing as part of Radio 3's drama strand. Sadly this doesn't feature a spoon-playing nun but it does feature spoon-playing, as like the Tom Wells play of the same name the Folk in Nell Leyshon's play is folk music. It's inspired by the story of the man credited with recording English folk songs for posterity, composer Cecil Sharp (Simon Russell Beale,) and the woman who first inspired him, Louie Hooper (Amanda Lawrence.) Living in rural Somerset with her sister Lucy (Amanda Wilkin,) the two have just buried their mother in 1903 when Sharp arrives to spend a week at a local manor house, and Louie gets volunteered as a housemaid for him to make some extra cash.

Radio review: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Two Gentlemen of Verona consist of one of Shakespeare's douchiest romantic leads in Proteus (Blake Ritson,) and one of the thickest in Valentine (Nikesh Patel,) who leaves Verona to seek his fortune in Milan, falling in love once there with the Duke's daughter Silvia (Kate Phillips.) Proteus eventually follows him there and falls for her himself; despite having sworn love to Julia (Lyndsey Marshal) back at home, and despite Valentine supposedly being his best friend, he immediately starts plotting to sabotage the relationship and steal Silvia for himself. Originally produced for BBC Radio 3 in 2019 and now available on BBC Sounds' Shakespeare Sessions, this version adapted by Sara Davies and directed by Celia de Wolff is a companion to the production of The Two Noble Kinsmen I listened to a few weeks ago, using the same cast and production team.

Radio review: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Even speaking optimistically it'll be a while before any live Shakespeare productions come along in 2021 (although multiple competing Romeo and Juliets are on their way digitally,) but in the meantime the BBC Sounds app offers an alternative: The Shakespeare Sessions podcast features, alongside various Bard-related documentaries and interviews, some of the Radio 3 adaptations from recent years. So with me not fancying another lockdown night in front of Netflix, one of the most obscure plays in the canon and the last one I ticked off my "seen onstage" list, but one which I've become more familiar with in the last few years, was an option. A candidate for the title of his final (collaborative) work, Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen is an eccentric, tragicomic adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale.

Radio review: Andromache

17th century French playwrights had a trend for recreating the themes and styles of Ancient Greek theatre, but while the originals are regularly seen as ripe for restaging and reinvention, I haven't seen a Racine play since 2012's Berenice. This Radio 3 adaptation by Edward Kemp, first broadcast in 2017, is one of those that literally went back to the same source of Greek mythology, although the story strand explored in Andromache was entirely obscure to me (and seems largely contradictory to some of the better-known stories.) It's Trojan War: The Next Generation as, a year after the sacking of Troy, the children of the victorious Greek generals try to tie up the remaining threads. So Pyrrhus (Alex Lanipekun,) son of Achilles and his successor as King of Epirus, has been betrothed to Hermione (Susannah Fielding,) daughter of Helen and Menelaus, for some time.

Radio review: I Am the Wind

I guess we're now reaching the point where I'm starved enough of theatrical content to be seeking out stuff I strongly suspect I won't like: Nearly ten years ago the Young Vic staged an elaborately designed and directed production of Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind, which came with much discussion of how the Norwegian playwright was one of the most frequently staged throughout Europe, except for the UK where he was virtually unknown. Well in the subsequent decade I haven't seen another Fosse play, nor do I even think I've heard of any major production being staged, so it's probably safe to say the play wasn't the hoped-for London breakthrough. I think the reviews were generally scathing, and my own opinion was that while the production was spectacular I remained unconvinced that there was much of substance underneath it. Now the same English version by Simon Stephens gets a radio production from Toby Swift, and what better way to see if my opinion's changed than by stripping the play down to just words and sound effects?

Radio review: Blithe Spirit

One of the first shows in my diary to get cancelled because of lockdown was the latest revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, but as with so many things the BBC comes to the rescue, with a 2008 radio adaptation by Bert Coules returning to the BBC Sounds app. Roger Allam plays Charles, the novelist who hires a local medium in order to copy her language and mannerisms for a fraud in his upcoming book; but Madame Arcati turns out to be the real thing, and after playing her favourite song in the room where she died, his first wife Elvira's (Zoë Waites) ghost materialises. Unfortunately for Charles, only he can see her, which causes much confusion with his second wife Ruth (Hermione Gulliford,) and soon a rivalry causes chaos in the house between the two wives, one of whom is dead, and possibly turning homicidal.

Radio review: Elizabeth and Essex

A few words about an odd little (but in some ways huge and epic) audio drama, written by Robin Brooks as an original Radio 3 play but feeling like it has a strong theatrical connection in the sense that I can imagine Simon Russell Beale was probably going to find a way to play Elizabeth I sooner or later. Although technically in Elizabeth and Essex he's playing the writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, whose writings the play is based on, and reveal him as a drama queen imagining himself as the Virgin Queen while writing his book about her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Strachey has recently become besotted with Roger (Harry Lloyd,) a much younger man who's star-struck by the writer and becomes hugely fond of him, but clearly doesn't feel anywhere near as strongly about him as the older man does, and who is gradually drawn away from Strachey as he falls for fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the economist John Maynard Keynes (Julian Harries.)