The Stage

Radio review: White Chameleon/A Bridge to the Stars/Hive mind/Gift

Published Monday 26 July 2010 at 14:03 by Moira Petty

If plays about science bring the future into today’s world, dramas about childhood put the past into contemporary focus. Both were on offer over the last fortnight, but when you strip away the sense of thrillerish trepidation that greets technological and medical innovation, you are left with the only real subject - the who? what? why? and where? of mankind.

Unsurprisingly, writers are intrigued by the formative if elusive quality of childhood. It is a land we have all lived in, yet it seems unreachable and puzzlingly contradictory once it is over. Dramas by two writers evoked early lives that were at once unique and yet familiar in a dreamlike way.

Christopher Hampton’s White Chameleon drew on the alluring, chaotic background of Alexandria in the fifties, where he lived for some years until the Suez Crisis forced him back to school in Britain. Born into a Cable & Wireless family, he likened the pain of being without roots to the nagging ache of a phantom limb. The play, first seen at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1991, was beaded with subtly-telling metaphors for his existence. Dislocation enhanced his need to belong, but the childhood Chris remarks presciently that the chameleon doesn’t alter its colour to blend in: the change is caused by light conditions and its emotional state.

His parents, played by Alex Jennings and Amanda Root, were of their time and class, yet seemed liberated by their peripatetic lifestyle. His father encouraged the writing ambitions of his son (beautifully played by Harvey O’Neil) and was kind to their servant, Ibrahim (Mido Hamada), a wonderfully brave and eccentric character. The older Christopher has, of course, ordered and reflected on his childhood, and his narration echoed that, pointing out the actions of the nascent writer in the observant child, alongside a powerful evocation of the sounds and sights of Alexandria under the direction of Polly Thomas.

There is a scene in which the boy is rescued from a banister, where he is dangling, by his father. Coincidentally, in Henning Mankell’s A Bridge To The Stars, dramatised from his novel by John Retallack, the young boy is plucked by his father from an arch he has climbed. This play was also set in the fifties, but the location was frozen northern Sweden and we were immediately plunged into a ‘town of ice’. As you might expect from the author of the Wallander detective stories, it was populated by characters who were mad or unusual or touched by the isolation of the place: at one point, the local ‘freak’ speaks out movingly.

At the centre of the non-autobiographical tale, a poignant portrait of abandonment, was young Joel (another superb childhood performance, this time from Ryan Watson). In one terrific scene, he is aghast when he enters his father’s bedroom and cannot hear him breathing - he is dead; no, it’s worse, he has gone. Every child’s fear was evoked in this exceptional tale.

Simon Bovey’s Hive Mind was set in 2019, when the honeybee is extinct and robot replicas are being tested to pollinate crops, rather than using migrant workers (their leader was played by the feisty Ania Sowinski). But the interesting premise was ruined by the patent greed and dastardliness of the inventor.

Philip Palmer’s Gift, about a son donating a kidney to a father who turned out not to be related to him after all, explored the ethical dimensions inherent in medical breakthrough when they are applied to messy real life. Daniela Nardini played a ball-breaking surgeon whose only wish was to cure her patient, whatever the fallout. I suspect listeners were yelling at their radios.

• White Chameleon, R4, Saturday, July 24

• A Bridge To The Stars, R4, Monday, July 26

• Hive Mind, R4, Monday, July 19

• Gift, R4, Tuesday, July 20