The Stage

Radio - drama

Published Monday 24 August 2009 at 15:40

All the guff surrounding expectations of a barbecue summer - indeed the mere definition of the phrase, with its tang of burning flesh and top note of acrid smoke - has riled me endlessly. But at last my hypertension has receded with the arrival of the perfect antidote - 90 minutes in the company of Yolanda Pupo-Thompson’s blissful play about naturalist Gilbert White, The Hybernaculum. I could feel myself entering the zone as White cut cucumbers and melons in the kitchen garden - how deliciously cool in every sense - and the deep hum of bees evoked the stillness of high summer.

The author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789 and based on 40 years’ worth of his records of the weather conditions and creatures of his part of Hampshire, would have been confounded by this clamour for Costa del Sol temperatures at home. White, a curate by trade, delighted in the minute observation of the seasons, of rainfall and atmospheric pressure, birdsong and the travails of the earthworm.

Although Pupo-Thompson’s drama took one day in his life, it was even more so a life in the day. By the summer of 1788, he was 68, one year away from publishing the book which was to inspire generations of ornithologists and ecologists and only five years away from his death. Fast losing his hearing, he was troubled by voices and sounds in his head which drove him ever more to escape noisy visitors for the peaceful corners of his estate. Director Matt Thompson evoked his disquieting tinnitus with an aural overlay of hallucinatory sounds and sonic buzzing, but this was not overplayed.

White did not seem a man to grumble excessively. Playing him, John Betts infused mild manners with lucidity, his laid-back stance with shafts of brilliant perception, for White was no bumbling rural geek. Nor was he given to anthropomorphism - in fact, it went in the reverse direction. White saw much of himself in Timothy the ancient tortoise, also a bachelor, while he saw a parallel with the cuckoo in the way he had brought up his niece and then sent her out into the world. All life, he said, was controlled by two urges, love and hunger, and he was no different.

While most ecological disasters seem to be man-made, man’s spitefulness to his fellow man knows few bounds. Christopher Trumbo’s play, Trumbo, about his Hollywood screenwriter father who was blacklisted in 1947 for “un-American activities”, was part elegy, part encomium and totally gripping. Dalton Trumbo, whose scripts include Roman Holiday, Spartacus and Exodus, was the first of the Hollywood ten of shunned writers to break through and receive his rightful screen credits, after being accused of having communist sympathies. As Trumbo, Corin Redgrave was nothing short of magnificent, especially in his spewing excoriation of those who spoke out against him. Director Roger Mitchell gave the piece a jazzy period feel, with moments of darkness, but also a dazzling slapstick scene as Trumbo attempted to roll out of bed and drive his wife in a car low on gas to the maternity ward.

If filial love was behind the writing of Trumbo, filmmaker Gillies MacKinnon wanted to explore the failings of men to develop emotional bonds with each other in his first radio play, Flesh and Blood. The disappearances of a teenaged boy highlighted the highly combustible relationship between his father (Gary Lewis) and grandfather (David Hayman), but was the catalyst for change. With Lewis and Hayman reflecting the unadulterated acrimony of the powerful script, it made for absorbing, if unsettling, listening. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

PROGRAMMES

The Hybernaculum R3, Sunday, August 23

Trumbo R4, Saturday, August 15

Flesh and Blood R4, Friday, August 21