The Stage

Radio review - Drama

Published Monday 22 February 2010 at 16:05 by Moira Petty

Heroes, barring the superhuman kind, are inevitably flawed. The contrast between virtue and vice, courage and defect, tantalises especially when they coalesce. In Murder in Samarkand, based on the memoir by the former British ambassador to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, his wife calls him a sociopath. Given that he had had a series of affairs and was now flaunting his relationship with an Uzbek pole dancer, it was surprising that she didn’t call him lots more names in a shower of verbal asterisks.

Sociopaths are anti-social - Murray frequented Tashkent’s fleshpots but this was no Carry On caper. He spoke out when he discovered the extent of torture meted out to the country’s dissidents and that information gathered by these means (one man had his nails pulled out and other torture inflicted while being boiled alive) was willingly accepted by the UK and the USA.

Perhaps there is something unusual in the mental wiring of people such as Murray. This was one of the ideas debated in David Hare’s original radio play - the piece was initially intended as a screen play until Paramout pulled the plug. Murray was personally ambitious, but moreover, he was not a man to hold his tongue or rubber stamp the morally ambiguous. Uzbekistan had just emerged as a vital ally of the west in the war on terror when Murray arrived there in 2002 and if the Foreign Office wanted an embassy that wouldn’t make waves, they had chosen the wrong man to front it.

David Tennant played Murray, cranking up the growing sense of abandonment with which he threw himself into fighting abuses of human rights and the burgeoning fear which led to a mental breakdown and his recall to London. Tennant doesn’t have the best voice for radio - it’s a bit reedy and he sometimes sounds as if he has his jaws clamped together, but here he soared and railed against internal and external demons.

Hare’s play was vivid and lively, moving between the different universes of Whitehall and Tashkent, and laying bare the paradox at the heart of conflicting interests in Uzbekistan. For a while the West championed the faltering steps towards liberalism taken by the new regime, it was complicit in the barbarism shown to many of the country’s dissenting Muslims. Hardly what you would call democracy.

Nearly two years ago, I hailed Peter Jukes’ play, Bad Faith, about a minister and prison chaplain struggling with his beliefs, as witty and gritty with touches of surrealism. Of Lenny Henry’s lead role, I said it confirmed his acting credentials. That play went out again this month as the first in a four-part series of the same name and the second play exceeded my memories of the first. Jukes’ writing is terrific - funny, deep, unafraid to move from the mundane to the reflective. Jake, his semi-heretical minister, is the most original creation of his kind that I can recall and Henry was born to play him, catching the rhythm of the comedy, as you would expect, as well as the tenor of the philosophy.

Henry was back as the singer and activist Paul Robeson in Annie Caulfield’s I’m Still the Same Paul, which powerfully captured the egotism and chauvinism alongside the political bravery. Corey Johnson’s bravura depiction of a CIA agent was the surprise narrator.

Ray Connolly’s delicately drawn tale of a marriage between a nun and a priest, God Bless Our Love, was a delight, while David Neilson, abandoning his dog collar for a wedding ring, brought to the role the subtle brilliance we see in his playing of Roy Cropper in Coronation Street.

PROGRAMMES

Murder in Samarkand R4, Saturday, February 20

Bad Faith R4, Friday, February 12

I’m Still the Same Paul R3, Sunday, February 21

God Bless Our Love R4, Wednesday, February 17