Radio review - Drama

Published Monday 16 June 2008 at 16:05 by Moira Petty

There are numerous literary portraits of exploitation below stairs and in factories and mills, but few of us would equate minimum wage slaves with the building industry. That is, of course, mostly down to the jaundice of the middle classes, battling to keep home improvements within budget. I’d never read Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, about heartless bosses and builders and decorators teetering between penury and the workhouse, but it seems that every well-known socialist of a certain age cites it as a seminal text in their political thinking.

The book fields a cast of characters almost as long as a Dickens novel and the key to this production - which could otherwise have been mired in misery and ideology - was in sharp delineations of individuals. The co-producer with Rebecca Pinfield was Johnny Vegas, who seems to have filled the production with his high calibre comedy mates.

The achievement here was not so much in bringing out the muted humour in the writing but the wretchedness of the lives described. The best comedians and comic actors not only have split-second timing but that ear for inflection and nuance, as vital to pathos as to humour.

Vegas himself played a worker riven with fear of his debts and the threat of being fired and who spent his time buttering up his foreman or lambasting his young wife - Shirley Henderson as the childish-sounding woman with an iron resolve. Vegas’ performance was full of subtleties, the familiar broken melancholy of his voice adding punch. The incomparable Timothy Spall added depth to the role of foreman, Crass, a character that it was impossible to like.

Bill Bailey was thin-lipped and uncompromising as the boss, and his sidekick, Paul Whitehouse put in a mordant turn as the aptly named Old Misery. Philip Jackson played the slow but sure craftsman, heading for the workhouse, in shades of light and dark. And John Prescott, in a cameo as a friendly policeman, made a much better job of acting than expected.

At a time when it has been revealed that children are still living below the poverty line in Britain, it was a welcome serialisation. I wonder if Gordon Brown was listening?

The difficulties of feeding your family when options are limited was also the theme of William Trevor’s hugely moving play, Sacred Statues, in which Gary Lydon’s talented carver in rural Ireland had to choose between a life of drudgery or a creative job which would leave his wife and children struggling.

After finding that his sometime benefector - played by Judy Parfitt, tremendous as the forgetful elderly woman - had fallen on hard times, the play took a distrubing turn. His wife (Eileen Walsh) offered their unborn baby to a childless couple in return for the cash to allow her husband to follow his artistic dreams. This was an essay in finely-tuned emotion, free of mawkishness and resonant with Trevor’s superbly-crafted writing.

Jonathan Myerson has come up with a fascinating contemporary adaptation of Anthony Trollope in The Way We Live Right Now. Victorian greed, bombast and philanthropy have become the cult of instant celebrity, manipulation of the money markets and media hype. Henry Goodman’s foreign entrepreneur sounded very like Mohammed al Fayed but, despite its wit, the enterprise lacked the passion of the original, with so many of the characters sounding like jaded carbon copies.

There was nothing derivative about Ed Hime’s Listen to the Words, in which a bleak humour infused a tale of mental instability and a student who learnt to tap phones. Joe Dempsie and Lizzie Watts gave performances of desolate vulnerability.

DETAILS:

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - R4, from Sunday, June 8

Sacred Statues - R4, Saturday, June 7

The Way We Live Right Now - R4, from Monday, June 16

Listen to the Words - R4, Wednesday, June 18