The Stage

Radio review - drama

Published Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 12:00 by Moira Petty

John Barrowman gives every sign of having the kind of Lycra personality that expands to fit the space available. So I expected him, as top bod in the Cardiff-based extraterrestrial unit, to take centre stage in Torchwood: Asylum, to inhabit the role, to be all flashing eyes and teeth (despite this being radio), to make it Tiger Bay meets Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

I, clearly, am not a viewer of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off created by Russell T Davies, which returns to television next week with five nights of wall to wall scheduling. I sat politely in front of the last Doctor Who Christmas special, admiration at full throttle, but the genre is not for me. Duty called, though, with the first of three Torchwood adaptations for radio, transmitted cheek by jowl in consecutive Afternoon Play slots.

The first surprise was how little Captain Jack hogged the limelight, screeching on with an anarchic act or comment before zipping off again. He only exerted his authority when his subordinates (played by Eve Myles and Gareth David-Lloyd and both sounding far more cuddly and less glam than they look in the publicity stills), threatened to turn it into The Gwen and Ianto Show.

The second surprise was how much I liked Anita Sullivan’s story of a desolate half-alien, half-human teenager, Frieda, who was blown in to earth through “The Rift” to face a dislocated future, haunted by the memories of those she has lost. Even the technological bits were infused with a droll wit while director Kate McAll gave us thrills and spills with an adroit use of effects. Erin Richards was touching as Frieda, the ultimate inter-galactic refugee in what became a paean to the lost. PC Andy (Tom Price) told her he knew how isolated she felt - he’d often felt that way himself. It was called “alienation” and was a marker of just how human you were.

If another civilisation had homed in on the offices of the American energy giant, Enron, on the run-up to its 2001 bankruptcy - taking with it huge numbers of ordinary investors - it would have seen humans at their most rapacious. Margaret Heffernan’s two part drama, Power Play (another hit for the much-criticised Afternoon Play) opened with a mix of extracts from the Senate’s hearing on the corporation’s demise and dramatised scenes of the corrupt, rule-bending money brokers in Enron’s trading division. They manipulated share values by cutting power to California, leaving hospitals in the dark “and little old ladies stuck in lifts”.

New recruit Vanessa (Andrea Le Blanc) soon adopted the immoral greed codes of her co-workers but in the second play she metamorphosed into a born-again gardener clipping the borders at Enron boss, Kenneth Lay’s home. He had been convicted but not sentenced when they met. Heffernan imagined a powerful confrontation between the two in which Lay (John Fleck) kept up the facade of God-fearing Christian to his end, triggered by a heart attack. The play ended with the news which shocked Enron’s victims. Lay’s real life death of a coronary came before he had appealed his sentence, which meant the guilty judgement was lifted and the state was unable to sequester his assets.

The title of Laura McDaid’s play, Dignity, told you everything about how she and her boyfriend, stricken in his twenties with the most severe form of multiple sclerosis, faced his crippling illness and suicide in a Swiss clinic. McDaid (played by Niki Doherty with Robert Sheehan as her boyfriend) recounted their tragedy with wit and pathos and made his self-determined death, when he could still physically hold his head up, the most rational of acts.

PROGRAMME DETAILS

• Torchwood: Asylum, R4, Wednesday, July 1

• Power Play, R4, from Monday, June 22

• Dignity, R4, Tuesday, June 30