The Stage

Production information

The Ancient Greeks really knew how to make a drama out of a crisis. There wasn't much time for navel gazing when the gods were around, meting out bloody justice, zooming in on human fallibilities. With the Ancients, far more comes out in the wash than you would ever have imagined. But a whole evening of it is like being trapped in the spin cycle. Timberlake Wertenbaker adapted Sophocles' three Oedipal plays as one production for the RSC in 1991 and now Radio 3 has staged it as The Thebans Evening., John Lynch starred in the four-hour marathon as a rather sexy sounding Oedipus but then I'm not his mother, so I'm allowed to say that. His mother, Jocasta, was played by Fiona Shaw with self-composure and great allure and Kenneth Cranham as Teiresias and Michael Feast as Kreon resonated complex emotions. There is a natural chronology and evolution in the three fifth-century plays, Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Kolonus and Antigone - but I have to admit I bailed out long before the end.

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Despite the seductiveness of the performances, in a production by Nadia Molinari that was exemplary in its clarity, the intensity was draining. Ancient Greek drama is constructed rather like an over-sensationalised soap - one hideous disaster after another with no time for the trivia which just as indelibly marks our lives.

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I really got the sense from Jonathan Myerson's series Male Order that the gods are alive and well and tinkering on the internet. That must by why conspiracy theories abound in cyberspace. The five playlets were about internet dating and were apparently based on research. On the basis of that it doesn't sound like the complete waste of time it is always made out to be, frequented, so we are led to believe, by losers and maniacs. Once ridiculous expectations had been put away, the internet daters of these enjoyable dramas experienced a sudden clarity of vision. I particularly enjoyed the second play with Nicola Walker as a spiky divorcee whose romantic refusenik instincts were eroded by the patience of her suitor.

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Desperation isn't the prettiest of traits in the would-be dater. When Jake, in Charlotte Jones' Talking to Strangers, decides to unplug himself from his computer, iPod, mobile phone, etc, and spend a week communicating with people, he made certain rules. He could only talk to strangers and they had to be as diverse a group as possible. And he couldn't chat anyone up. After a series of encounters which were mini-dramas in themselves, Jake (Toby Jones) met the kind of woman he would never have approached in the past. Freed from the constraints of being a dating desperado, he began to take a lateral approach to romance. Flashbacks took us to Jake's childhood and the needy, garrulous Jewish mother - a lovely performance by Samantha Spiro - he couldn't stand. Detached from all his high tech playthings, Jake's approaches to strangers on Brighton beach led him to a profound understanding of his mother. "You are a woman of worth," he told her in a beautiful resolution of long-held prejudices and traumas. Jones, the author of the successful stage play Humble Boy, is well known to fans of radio drama. Her humanity and wit shone out here.

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A rundown property in which the gods seem to have passed retributive grief down through successive tenants was the spooky theme of Dickens' A House to Let. The nosy spinster neighbour keen to uncover its secrets was played by the marvellous Marcia Warren. She may not have the inflammatory qualities of Jocasta but she sounded like a goddess to me.

Production information can change over the run of the show.