Radio review - drama

Published Monday 22 September 2008 at 11:45 by Moira Petty

You clearly get a better class of joke on painting holidays on the Greek islands than, say, a Costa package with poolside games and cheeky cabaret.

Lynne Truss’ latest play, Bora Bora, is set against an upmarket backdrop of olive trees and Hellenic ruins as amateur watercolourists struggle to express themselves visually.

One of them, Margaret (Cheryl Campbell sounding quite formidable) is a retired negotiator for ACAS, the arbitration service.

Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, couldn’t resist giving her a joke about acronyms, in which trade unions meet high culture. Margaret recalled a poster which read ‘NATSOPA at ACAS’. “It sounded like a lesser-known Handel opera,” she said.

In Bora Bora, Truss maintains her standing as one of our leading radio dramatists, by adroitly balancing emotional peaks with ironic, knowing humour. She wrote the role of Alec, the troubled aesthete who has taken a vow of silence over his early life, for Derek Jacobi - it fits like couture. The catalyst of change is a biographer (Adrian Bower), who gatecrashes the art group Alec is leading.

We have already heard the voice of Alec’s late brother Tony, a famous actor, in a resonant cameo by Corin Redgrave, recalling a childhood Alex doesn’t recognise. Alec has been traumatised by a Lord of the Flies-style movie he starred in as a child and, he wrongly thinks, messed up. His brother agreed to intervene to prevent its release by making up a terrible story about Alec to their father, who happened to be the head of the studio.

Jacobi’s mournful undertones gradually replace the pragmatic jollity of his character. Two lives were revealed as having been riven by a sibling rivalry they did not fully understand. Alec, who had been so ready to absolve his brother, was left struggling to reassess his life and all in the space of an hour with wit thrown in for free.

Another absorbing play specially written for radio came from Ronald Frame with his Cold War romance, Blue Wonder. Otto (Jamie Glover) was an East German ‘Romeo spy’ - a personable young man sent to woo unworldly young women into gathering information for him.

We knew from the first scene that Alice (Clare Corbett) and her grown-up son had been given new identities before he was born.

When the action rewound to 1967, we were therefore in possession of more information than she had been, which highlighted her naivety and vulnerability as her lover cajoled her into stealing papers from her boss. This encouraged the listener to invest emotionally in the play aided by David Ian Neville’s highly cinematic production.

By serendipity it seems, rather than an archaeological excavation of his own forbears, writer John Preston discovered that his late aunt, Peggy Piggott, was the young archaeologist called away from her honeymoon in the late thirties to help pull out the Anglo-Saxon treasures buried at Sutton Hoo.

With her new marriage looking less than exciting and the country bracing itself for war, Preston had material for a novel, The Dig, now dramatised in five parts. Anna Madeley was wonderfully touching as spirited Peggy, albeit dutifully submissive to her husband, in a plaintive collision of past and present, with humour from a cast of period-sounding eccentrics.

Who wouldn’t enjoy the tragic farce of domestic lives splintering apart under the weight of DIY and crushed expectations in Just Between Ourselves, with Stephen Critchlow and Samantha Spiro wringing out their roles for every excruciating detail? So I couldn’t work out why Ayckbourn’s 1978 play felt dated. Relationships don’t get easier. Maybe DIY has moved on a bit.

DETAILS

Bora Bora - R4, Saturday, September 20

Blue Wonder - R3, Sunday, September 14

The Dig - R4, from Monday, September 15

Just Between Ourselves - R4, Saturday, September 13