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Radio review

Published Monday 3 November 2008 at 16:05 by Moira Petty

I’ve felt queasy several times recently when listening to the radio and I wasn’t even tuned into Radio 2 at the time. Oddly though, the play which featured an amputated, cancer-ravaged head bobbing around in a specimen jar - a fate which some commentators would have visited upon Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross - left me feeling uplifted.

This was Nowt To Look At, another winner in an extraordinary run by Radio 3’s The Wire series. Author Valerie Laws was inspired by her award-winning forensic and pathology-themed poetry as one of the artists in residence at the Gordon Museum of Pathology (go to www.thisfatalsubject.org for more on that). She has immersed herself in some of the grislier aspects of medicine for years, attending dissection classes and meeting scientists for the pathology project. But, like those who know a lot about a subject, she underpinned the play with her knowledge but never let it overwhelm the writing.

Its primary focus was the late Annie, owner of the head whose eyes ‘milky and staring’ made medical students cringe. Annie knew why, “It’s the relief that it’s you not them. And the fear that it might be one day.” Laws’ descriptions of death and deformity were unflinching (a skin cancer known as a rodent ulcer had lifted off Annie’s face “like the crust off a cornbeef pie”). But from the outset, Pat Dunn’s performance stamped Annie as honest, humorous and perceptive.

Her story, a medley of pathos and black comedy, emerged through the testimony of her cocky, medical student nephew (Brian Lonsdale) and neighbour Roz (Christine Berriman-Dawson). An aortic aneurysm, a cataclysmic heart condition, had killed her but the onset of dementia had prevented her seeking help for the skin cancer eroding her face. Instead, she hid away in a flat without mirrors. A lightbulb went on in the head of Roz, who had never rated her own looks. “That’s what you do with ugliness - keep it in the dark.”

Annie had willed her head to medical science, insisting it faced another exhibit in the pathology museum, the deformed heart of her mother whose actions had sentenced Annie to a loveless life. Laws somehow also wove in a narrative around Roz, involving her rape, birth of a deformed child and the specimens of malformed foetuses also on show. Despite the gothic sense of melodrama, the play had a tremendous sense of stillness (well, Annie wasn’t going anywhere), of the implacability and redemptive nature of death on spectators.

Why did I feel so nauseous, then, when listening to Carl Grose’s 49 Donkeys Hanged? Perhaps it was the all too-realistic sound effects in Claire Grove’s production. If it did not make easy listening, it was a very clever play. Following the lead of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Grose had his donkey-hanging farmer (Charles Barnecut) rebel against what the script was forcing him to do. We had already heard from Grose by then, explaining that this was based on a newspaper headline he read in Soweto and he later discovered the sad story behind it. In an absurdist twist worthy of Pirandello, Grose was mistaken by the farmer’s wife for her dead son and only narrowly avoided the ultimate exit stage left himself.

Brutality and misery reigned in the serialisation of the rediscovered A Life of Chekhov by Irene Nemirovsky, whose wartime memoirs created a recent sensation. When the Chekhov family weren’t using each other as punchbags, chickens were throttled and even shot at. Andrew Scott’s Anton was the epitome of sanity but little wonder that his plays caught ‘the sickness of the soul.’

DETAILS

Nowt To Look At, R3, Saturday, October 25

49 Donkeys Hanged, R3, Saturday, November 1

A Life Of Chekhov, R4, Monday, November 3

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