Radio review - drama

Published Monday 25 July 2005 at 18:00 by Moira Petty

A man drowns, a child falls to her death. Onlookers gawp, freeze and get on with their own lives. Two plays explored those on the periphery of a tragedy. Jim Burke’s Silt was inspired by a 1906 newspaper report of a man who had drowned in a lake in Manchester where Sunday promenaders gathered in the expectation that his body would re-emerge within hours.

The play was described in the publicity blurb as “blackly comic” but if so, the jokes had been lost along the way. The tone, rather, was elegiac and dreamlike, as the victim described his own willing immersion in the water, how the weeds wrapped around him and the lake consumed and altered his body. Backed by Tom Moss’ original score, the effect was of a languid underwater ballet.

Around the victim’s account were woven those of spectators including a newspaper man whose hardbitten exterior was finally shaken by coming eye to eye with the corpse. A woman (Deborah McAndrew) whose husband was missing, convincingly ran the gamut of emotions from the fear that he was the drowned man to the sinking realisation that he wasn’t, meaning her unsatisfactory marriage would continue. The key figure among those on the bank was an artist (Kaye Wragg), sketching there when the man drowned. In the face of death, she said, she wanted her drawing to be “a communion of the living”. Eloquent and elegant, the play registered the effect of the death on the onlookers but also, ultimately, their distance from it. Life went on.

Dennis Kelly’s play, Colony, took these themes on a stage. The tenor was compulsive and brittle. A baby escaped onto the balcony of a flat while other residents of the block, idly working from their windows, failed to act, either transfixed by the drama, caught up in their own worlds, or preferring to use the incident for their own purposes. The author creates a vivid group of characters, each of them life’s casualties. Adam Godley’s ant enthusiast is warped by a failed love affair while Bryan Dick’s hyperactive teenager lives in the fantasy world of the would-be war reporter. The character you would least wish to know was, surprisingly, the apparently selfless young woman, caring for her invalid mother. Carolyn Tomkinson brought out the cruelty of a bruised woman who wanted everyone to learn the hard way as she had.

Perhaps she had been reading the Roman histories of Suctonius, one of the sources for Mike Waller’s second three-part Caesar. The initial trilogy on the origins of the Roman emperors went out two years ago. This second series focusses on the emperors of peace, beginning with Nero, whose mother Agrippina was an extraordinarily manipulative figure. The Lady Macbeth of her day, she coached her son for the top job through a gripping good cop/bad cop routine, playing both roles herself. Frances Barber plays this kind of virago well and Jonathan Forbes is the soft-hearted Nero in an intimate portrait.

Sarah Daniels’ series Soldiers’ Wives is also rooted in history, or at least personal histories, as it is based on interviews with real army wives. I think I would have preferred to hear the source material. The transition to drama made the accounts sound false and stilted. Despite a cast including Juliet Aubrey as the Major’s wife, Suzanna Hamilton as the abused wife of a sergeant and the outstanding Maxine Peake as the base’s beautician, who hears all their secrets, the effect is curiously one-dimensional.

Ian Richardson’s schoolmaster might have had something to teach one or two of the Caesars with his effective meting out of judgement and punishment in the glorious new series, The Pickerskill Detentions. Andrew McGibbon’s idiosyncratic and very funny script, allied with Richardson’s unwavering performance, made it a treat.

DETAILS

Silt - R4, Tuesday, July 19

Colony - R3, Saturday, July 16

Caesar - R4, from Sunday, July 17

Soldiers’ Wives - R4, from Monday, July 18

The Pickerskill Detentions - R4, from Wednesday, July 13