The Stage

Radio review - drama

Published Monday 25 February 2008 at 16:00 by Moira Petty

The publicity notes for a new retelling of Faust describe the eponymous would-be roue as ‘donnish, good with words, spells and keen on sex’.

Sounds ideal. If only he’d stuck to placing lonely hearts ads along those lines. Unfortunately his fantasies were bigger than his appetite and his imperative to Mephistopheles to “give me young virgins, Helen of Troy,” soon waned.

In their clever adaptation of Faust, Martin Jenkins and Jonathan Holloway drew parallels with the mindless hedonism on offer today. Mark Gatiss’ debonair Mephistopheles said that selling your soul to him was like signing up to an adult subscription channel, the nervousness and anticipation giving way to dull anti-climax.

Julian Rhind-Tutt’s Faust hid his desire for cheap thrills beneath a patina of plausibility and an understated performance that chimed with Tim Dee’s production which was marked by quiet desperation and mournful inevitability.

Girlfriend in a Coma was another spin on the Faustian pact for the slacker generation. The novel by Douglas Coupland, the Generation X author, was adapted with verve and fidelity by Dan Rebellato, who caught the tang of have-it-all, bored-with-it-all youth. Even the parodies (Pam, who listens to Supertramp, wears Charlie perfume and cries: “How many calories in lipgloss?”) provided amused exasperation and their very stupidity hung in the air like humidity before a thunderstorm.

Rayisa Kondracki was earnest and naive as the girlfriend who suddenly fell into an 18-year coma while her boyfriend Richard (Jason Durran) mooched around in professional other-half-of-tragic-girl mode before reinventing himself as a movie mogul. He had been introduced early on as someone who always wished he was the narrator and it was through his analysis that we understood the evasions and botched ambitions of their group.

Producer Polly Thomas expertly stitched the earlier sections of the narrative to the apocalyptic events which followed Karen’s awakening from her coma and her vision that the world is about to end. Only her group seemed to survive and, without moral or intellectual integrity, lapsed into fecklessness. They were offered the chance to return to the world, but at a price - Karen would become comatose again and they would have to dedicate themselves to finding out the meaning of life. Backed by Alice Trueman’s powerful music, these refugees from hedonism returned to a world which treated them as lunatics.

That the world is never kind to those who are different was expressed with stunning eloquence in Esther Wilson’s The Heroic Pursuits of Darleen Fyles. The central character, a 23 year old with learning difficulties who understood the world through the hospital and police dramas she watched obsessively, was played by Donna Lavin, with the kind of acting that stays with you. Her emotions were on the surface, but there was a sense that she understood the subtext of her life more than most.

She projected herself into a world that only cared when it had the time and inclination. This was an extraordinary performance that marks Lavin out as a name to watch. Claire Rushbrook, as the volunteer with so many troubles of her own you wondered who was helping who, acted opposite her with a dawning understanding of her past.

In a fortnight of excellent drama, Katie Him’s The Cool Bag Baby was a strong depiction of the tragedies in ordinary lives, in a production by Kate Rowland that was alive with music, sobbing, abandonment and haunting references to ‘a fat woman walking down the street.’

This tragic figure was played by Sophie Stanton who spoke with the catatonic tone of the depressed and in so doing spoke volumes.

DETAILS

• Faust - R4, from Monday, February 18

• Girlfriend in a Coma - R3, Sunday, February 24

• The Heroic Pursuits of Darleen Fyles - R4, Friday, February 22

• The Cool Bag Baby - R3, Sunday, February 17