006 Contemporary Drama – Old
I’ve since heard a drama with a similar conceit to A Slow Train to Woking, but considering
the latter was made in the pre-digital era (2000), it is all the more
impressive. Written by and starring
Michael Mears and directed by Enyd Williams, it is a dark comedy in which Mears
plays all 28 characters. This sounds
unlikely, given that one of the main characters is an elderly woman who sings
hymns. Nevertheless, Mears makes it
completely authentic. Daniel takes the
slow train to Woking every weekend to visit his mother, whose grip on his soul
is absolute. He takes the slow train,
then a bus, so that he can delay this torture for as long as possible. His mother calls him all during the week,
too. When his cousin Bram suggests that
Daniel move his mother to a retirement community, his mother Lily responds with,
“After all I’ve done for you . . .”
Daniel has various fantasy sequences in which he imagines visiting the
seaside rather than his mother. In the
end, he never moves her to the retirement community because she dies, after
hitting her head, about three weeks after he imagines going to the seaside
instead of Woking. While he has some odd
revelations about his mother—he had assumed that she almost never left the
house, but the pub landlord told him she was in there every Saturday night—he
feels ambivalent about the idea of her ghost at the window to the old house,
twitching the net curtain in anticipation of his arrival. It was quite like a Giles Cooper drama,
except decidedly more upbeat, in the end.
A Meeting with Dora by
Don Shaw is a strange yet utterly moving story that feels as if it’s been
carefully picked by its author for the medium of radio above all others. In it, Don Shaw recounts the somewhat
fictionalized account of a meeting he had with suffragette Dora Russell in the
late 1970s. He was then working on a
film project based on Dora’s life (and her autobiography) and went to meet her
in a windswept cottage in Cornwall. The
sprightly woman, in her 80s, was clearly a force of nature and is played as
such, beautifully, by Eleanor Bron. Don
and Dora, brought together by a lack of heat in the cottage, quickly fall into
each other’s confidences. Dora still
can’t understand why Bertrand, her husband, left her for their children’s
governess, even though the event had passed 50 years previously. Dora piercingly traces Don’s accent to his
father via D.H. Lawrence and, in so doing, Don reveals truths about himself
that he has told no one else. His
father, the product of an unloving upbringing, could not show affection for
Don, nor could Don’s mother (these repressed English people, ye gods). By working through this, Don gains some
understanding and catharsis, while Dora herself begins to see that Bertrand was
much in the same vein, hence he could not love and therefore never actually
loved her. In and out of this deeply
penetrative conversation wanders Dora’s son John (David Schofield), a
middle-aged schizophrenic who got thrown out of the House of Lords and refuses
to take his medication. Ending the story
on the reflection that Margaret Thatcher is about to be Prime Minister,
representing the antithesis of so many of the things Dora spent her lifetime
working for (although, to be fair, Thatcher as the first female Prime Minister
also reflects Dora’s longstanding campaign for equal rights), Don notes that
the film was never made, and that Dora died not long after he met her, with
John following her shortly after that.
Yet, it doesn’t feel as if she’s really gone, given the intensity of
Don’s recollections and Bron’s performance. Originally from 2014, it was directed by Pauline Harris.
I was very impressed with Sound Barriers, this rather quotidian-seeming drama that in fact
concealed incredible characters played by talented actors. Each character recounts what has been
happening to them in monologue, without ever interacting with each other. I’m not a huge fan of the monologue in radio
drama, but this usage was exceptional. It’s also not clear for a long time how
the three characters know each other, but they are brought together in a solid,
Love Actually-like fashion by the
end. Audrey (Patricia Routledge) is an elderly lady who lives in a flat and is
perturbed by her neighbor, a young professional with a new baby who cries all
the time, and Ian (Steve Day), a deaf man.
Audrey’s story is very poignant because her daughter lives in the US,
and Audrey can only visit her for a week per year. Audrey is so lonely and depressed, she spends
her time going by bus to a shopping center where she pretends she is in
America, and that her daughter’s family is going to come round the corner any moment. Ian is the deaf man who lives in the same
flats as Audrey, and his perspective is a remarkable one. He navigates life in the hearing world by
lip-reading and writing on a notepad.
His best friend is a gay man, and Ian fails to see that the antagonistic
woman in the Deaf Club is actually pining for him. Instead, he gets involved in a relationship
(quite to his surprise) with the mother of the baby who is crying all the
time. Eventually, Audrey and Ian realize
they have been used by the desperate mother, who is unable to come to terms with
the fact her baby has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and that she is an alcoholic, by
helping her fulfil the requirements of her social worker, Jenny (Caroline
Quentin). Jenny, it turns out, has had
her career dogged by a certain journalist who has decried social work, and it
has made her extremely jaded. Naturally,
that journalist is the mother, who is humbled and at Jenny’s mercy. It all ends all right, with Audrey finding
companionship with the mother and her baby, Ian finding confidence and a role
as a surrogate father, and Jenny leaving behind her shell of depression and
self-doubt. Originally from 2005, it was written by Sarah Daniels and directed
by Sally Avens.
I decided to listen to The
Launch more for the fact it was written by Simon Bovey than for the story
(although it also features a very young Carl Prekopp!). I was rewarded by an
interesting, quite anguished drama.
During the Second World War, Jack Avery was a young pilot, along with
his brother Alan. He watched flying ace
Bingham (Ronald Pickup, in perhaps the best role I’ve ever heard him in) shoot
his brother’s plane. Incensed and
insistent that justice should be done, Jack (Trevor Peacock) works tirelessly
for decades to bring Bingham to justice (as he sees it). Everyone around him denies that this could
have happened. When, at last, his tale
is told in an exposé book published by Paul Katz (Ewan Bailey), he is surprised
to be met face-to-face with Bingham.
Jack’s bitterness has affected every aspect of his life, such that his
relationship with his daughter Elizabeth (Carolyn Pickles) is fraught. She argues that Jack’s crusade has drained
any evidence of the real Alan from life, so that she doesn’t even know the kind
of her person that her uncle was. At the
book launch, Jack also meets Herman Wulff (Christopher Godwin), who was also
flying at that time—albeit on the other side.
The message which Jack must absorb—and believe me, throughout the drama
it’s really touch and go whether he will actually absorb this or not—is
forgiveness. Originally from 2002, it
was directed by David Hutchinson.
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