The Stage

Radio review - Drama

Published Monday 23 February 2009 at 15:00 by Moira Petty

It’s odd how sentimental a lot of science fiction is - as if the effort of imagining the future warps and truncates real emotion at birth.

Kicking off BBC Radio’s Science Fiction Season was a work by the towering genius of the genre. Philip Osment’s feature-length adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine did a little time travelling of its own, opening Wells’ 1895 novella in 1943.

Wells, played with venerable gravity by William Gaunt, is recording a broadcast whose theme is man’s capacity to annihilate himself and the world. He then tells how, at a dinner party in 1885, he witnessed the return of the Time Traveller, dishevelled and shoe-less, after a trip to the distant future.

He had discovered that the inequities of the class system had spawned two separate races, with the underclass, the Morlocks, cannibalising the indulged but defenceless elite, the Eloi.

This is where Jeremy Mortimer’s production took on a similarly schizophrenic edge. Wells’ tone of philosophical discourse smudged into something that uncomfortably resembled the sentimentality so prevalent in sci fi.

The Eloi sounded a bit like the aliens from the Cadbury’s Smash commercial, merged with the winsome quality of ET. However, Robert Glenister’s performance as the Time Traveller - gritty, clear-sighted and a little manic - did much to redeem the play. And the scenes in which he and his little Eloi companion did battle with the Morlocks were a triumph of aural choreography. John Nicholls’ sorrowful music echoed Well’s doomsday scenario to chilling effect.

A potent example of divided Britain was provided by a glorious production of Alan Bennett’s The Lady In The Van. In 1971, a down-and-out in a rusting Bedford van pitched up in the street of period villas abutting Regent’s Park where Bennett has his London home. The eponymous woman inched closer to his house, persuading him with a mix of logic and mania that brooked no arguments, to allow her to set up home in his driveway, where she died in 1989.

Maggie Smith, reprising the role of the razor-tongued Miss Mary Shepherd, was defiantly human to the end, despite her reduced circumstances.

Bennett played himself, in that familiar tone of witty querulousness, with Adrian Scarborough as another Bennett who questioned his motives and demanded honesty.

Based on a 1990 memoir, the 1999 stage production was criticised in some quarters for a lack of narrative drive. This was no impediment on radio - this adaptation, by director Gordon House, thrived on a drama that is a series of confrontations, topped and tailed by Bennett’s interior monologues.

As his mother vanished into dementia (a wonderful cameo by Marcia Warren), Bennett remarked: “At the north and south gates of my life stands a demented woman.” Observing the reactions of neighbours and social workers, he doffed his cap with weary recognition of the “gnomic wisdoms and truth-tellings of tramps these days - Godot has a lot to answer for”.

Rory Kinnear squawked his way classily through an exuberant serialisation of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s evergreen satire of journalism. Dawn French was let down by dated material in Mastering The Universe, by Christopher Douglas and Nick Newman, a retread of domestic sex wars which might have found a home with Terry and June.

Harry Venning and David Ramsden’s Clare In the Community is a lesson in how to return, series after series, with freshly reworked comic material. Sally Phillips’ social worker Clare has become the mother of little Thomas Paine (after the social reformer, following a flirtation with the name Mahatma). Her world view has become more excruciating than ever, ramping up the comedy to heady heights.

DETAILS

The Time Machine - R3, Sunday, February 22

The Lady In The Van - R4, Saturday, February 21

Scoop - R4, Sunday, February 15

Mastering The Universe - R4, Tuesday, February 24

Clare In The Community - R4, Wednesday, February 19