The Stage

Radio - Drama

Published Monday 19 September 2005 at 15:50 by Moira Petty

Putting together a new production of Northanger Abbey is not for the superstitious. It seems to be the theatrical equivalent of opening Tutankhamen’s tomb, even if the curse it brings with it is not sudden and mysterious death but the threat of bad reviews. Of all Jane Austen’s novels, this is considered the one most resistant to adaptation for screen, stage or radio. BBC Radio’s last original production was more than 40 years ago, although in 1972 it broadcast what appears to have been an unmemorable radio version of a theatre production of Austen’s satire on the Gothic novel.

So have producer Pam Fraser Solomon and dramatist Dominic Power risen to the difficult challenge with this three-parter? As yet, it is hard to say. The opening episode covered the sequences in Bath, where penniless ingenue Catherine Morland is escorted by rich friends, the Allens. Who could fail to be charmed by the social pirouetting of Bath at full throng - the snobberies, the flirtations, the attempts to rise in society, all set against Catherine’s wider-eyed and naive incomprehension of love and life. The vital test of this production will be when the action moves to gloomy Northanger Abbey.

2004 Carlton Hobbs winner Emily Wachter is sweetly unaffected as Catherine but David Harewood as the hero, Henry Tilney, failed to make a huge impression. There is time, though, for reassessment, as the character does not come into his own until the action moves to his home turf, the eponymous Abbey. Catherine’s mentor, Mrs Allen, was beautifully flashed out by Julia McKenzie, who added an occasional sharpness of tone to a character normally seen as anodyne.

The exploitative duo, Isabella Thorpe and her mother, were, in performances by Claire Skinner and Jenny Agutter, delightfully dastardly as they home in on Catherine and her brother, whom they assumed to be in line for the childless Allens’ riches. Austen is so often taken as the template for romantic fiction but the harsh facts of economics - survival of the fittest more often meant marrying for money, with love viewed as a distraction - were well illustrated in this thoroughly enjoyable opening instalment.

The vital role of money in women’s lives was also the theme of a clever Woman’s Hour Drama, Cash Cows. Author April de Angelis based it on Schnitzler’s La Ronde, in which a series of sexual encounters come full circle. Here, it is a £20 note and the lives of women on various rungs of the financial ladder, which rotate through five scenes. Joanna Kanska, Susan Jameson, Elizabeth Spriggs and Sally Hawkins were among an exemplary cast in a production which allied emotions to hard cash.

Michael Butt’s drama about the shooting of three IRA members by the SAS on Gibraltar in Marcy 1988, It’s Enough to Believe You’re in Danger, was rigid with dramatic tension. But what made this a superior production was the emotional sensibility of the writing. Butt went behind the facts to imagine the thoughts and feelings of those on both sides. Henry Goodman was the M15 officer haunted to the point of incapacity by the memory of his missing daughter. Gerard Murphy, Stephen Boxer and Brid Brennan were the Irish activists, brains alive with literature and rebellion, who were gunned down without warning. The scenario was depressingly familiar.

I like it when radio disinters a dramatic idiosyncracy, into which category Karel Capek’s symbolist thirties play War With the Newts, definitely falls. The newts are super-intelligent beings who are first protected, then exploited by man until they rise up and threaten the end of the world. George Poles’ audience-friendly adaptation had the author (Dermot Crowley) and his wife (rising young star Sally Hawkins) narrating the story. Despite its big themes, the tone was often comical with a beguiling Alice in Wonderland sense to many of the larger than life characters.

DETAILS

Northanger Abbey - R4, from Sunday, September 18

Cash Cows - R4, from Monday, September 19

It’s Enough to Believe You’re in Danger - R3, Thursday, September 8

War With the Newts - R3, Sunday, September 18