Thursday, September 27, 2018

Quarter 2 Reviews- 005 Contemporary Drama


005 Contemporary Drama – New

This category was particularly strong this time around.  I found Stream, River, Sea by Peter Souter really affecting, which was a testament both to the writing and to the excellent performances.  Bella (Juliet Stevenson) and Hugh (Alex Jennings) meet in the hospital as their respective husband and mother are dying.  Bella is deeply in love with her husband who died much too young.  Hugh has been caring for his bedridden mother for twenty years.  While Hugh’s role becomes someone to help Bella get through her pain, Bella has to help Hugh live his life for the first time.  Bella’s daughter Daisy (Lizzy Watts) is a typically acid-mouthed teenage brat, but by the end, they are a content trio.  The dark humor of the scene in which Hugh and Bella encounter each other in the crematorium is funny and poignant. The drama was directed by Gordon House. 

Radio 1Xtra’s Quarter Life Crisis by playwright Yolanda Mercy was a revelation. I thought it was the perfect plug for the gap that I had been looking for—a radio drama that appealed to the younger generation, was witty, well-written, and felt authentic.  It was also a natural fit for Radio 1Xtra due to its ongoing hip hop soundtrack.  Yolanda Mercy starred as a 25-year-old from London who hasn’t quit grown up yet and is trying to figure out her place in the world.  She’s tired of zero-hour contracts but isn’t ready to get married and settle down, like her cousin Titi.  She has to deal with the layers of ancestry from her Nigerian family and that she was the only black person in her Deptford university class.  I felt like everything Mercy said chimed with both the lives of my students, who are about six years younger than 25, and myself, who is about ten years older.  Quite a feat to be able to do that.  The frankness about sex also seemed authentic.  I hope there is more to come in this vein.  It co-starred Jocelyn G Essien, Barba Ayojude, Maya Watkins, Shalla Adubuse, Lily Bevin, Leke Adubayu, Simon Akim Bumi, and Lola Aladeshli and was directed by Caroline Raphael.

I’m glad to see that Nick Warburton still has new tricks up his sleeve.  Oliver Park a really interesting take on the mockumentary.  Nick Warburton is BBC Radio 4’s resident Church of England writer, and given that he is a high-quality writer, he aids the cause of Christianity when he writes thoughtful, original drama that is highly attuned to what I consider to be the most important messages of Christianity.  I note that he has a predilection for Easter stories rather than what, on radio, have tended to be the more favored Christmas stories.  Oliver Park sits well beside his earlier excellent work, Witness, which did for this generation what Dorothy Parker’s religious plays did for hers.  Oliver Park is presented as a documentary which looks back at a fictional event in which a tense atmosphere in a south-eastern coastal town blows apart during marches at Oliver Park, with the murky death of a peaceful protester.  You have your disciple figure, your Mary Magdalene figure (Emerald O’Hanrahan), your Judas figure, your King Herod figure, and your Caiaphas figure.  The Jesus figure barely speaks—obviously, he’s been killed and has done nothing so crass as rise literally from the dead—which is in keeping with convention in religious radio dramas.  The Jesus figure’s message of peace and tolerance is a simple one, explicitly linked to refugees, and Sam Dale as the head of a vigilante group of “neighborhood watch” who are in no mood to tolerate refugees or protesters, is absolutely chilling.  I understand it was a largely improvised performance, and it sounds very authentic.  It also starred Tracy Wiles, Arian Nik, Michael Imerson, and Mark Dowd.  It was directed by Paul Arnold.

The Deletion Committee was very much in Mark Lawson’s style, topical and provocative.  An unnamed waxworks, a thinly disguised Madame Tussaud’s, is having a board meeting in which it will be decided which figures are deleted and melted down.  What is the criteria for deletion?  Well, if some #MeToo allegations have been made against the figure in question, down to Germaine Greer for saying insensitive things about trans people.  The new member, young, black, and female Gemma (Ferruche Offia), is all for a policy of no tolerance; board member Abigail (Samantha Bond), a trendy older journalist, is mostly in agreement with Gemma but occasionally and secretly would like to agree with her colleague, lawyer Sam (Bill Paterson), who makes every deletion a debate.  Sam is no dinosaur, but he brings up thoughtful and relevant questions about guilty until proven innocent, whether Twitter is the correct arena for assigning guilt.  Gemma also brings up good points regarding the complicity of society in allowing destructive behavior over the centuries.  What are the answers?  It’s hard to tell.  The Deletion Committee also starred Paul Freeman and Abram Rooney.  It was directed by Eoin O’Callaghan.

I’m surprised to admit it, but Chopping Onions by Becky Prestwich made me cry.  I thought from the description (perhaps I didn’t read it carefully enough) that this was going to be a comedy.  Instead, it was a fraught and tense drama about three generations of Jewish women.  Esther (Christine Cox) was the family matriarch, but after she has a stroke, her daughter Ruth (Maureen Lipman) moves her into her own house.  Ruth’s daughter Vanessa (Sarah Smart) is also there with her baby Daniel.  Due to the stroke, Esther finds it difficult to make herself understood.  Ruth is trying to make chicken soup, but her mother is unable to keep out of the kitchen.  She tries to prepare Esther for the fact that Vanessa (who married a non-Jew) wants Daniel to be christened.  Esther eventually escapes and goes back to her old house, in the process making Vanessa absolutely crazy as Esther takes baby Daniel with her.  The only other speaking character in this drama is the befuddled taxi driver (Sushil Chudisama).  It was directed by Pauline Harris.

Not sure how I missed the previous five series of The Interrogation.  I’m glad I heard episodes Ross and Jack, as they’re very well-written.  Apparently, when first DCI Matthews (Kenneth Cranham) and DS Armitage (Alex Lanipekin) first were teamed together, they disliked each other.  Well, by now that’s long gone.  The personal story that occasionally comes out of this trio of dramas regards Armitage’s incipient fatherhood.  Cranham has a voice that can be turned to hero or villain, at least on radio, which must be excellent fun for him.  I wasn’t, of course, familiar with the setup of the episodes, so I was very impressed with the first offering.  Each episode begins with the monologue from the perpetrator, so once you know the formula, you aren’t necessarily in suspense for a whodunit—it’s why they did it and what, exactly, did they do?  Matthews and Armitage give the impression that they would be extremely annoying to actually be interviewed by, as they have the effective technique down like a pair of sharks.  It’s interesting to see how they alter this from interviewee to interviewee.  Ross was dynamite; the listeners become detectives, too, unravelling a case when a diagonal approach is the only effective one. Williams’ ear for dialogue is second-to-none, making each new character sound authentic.  Ross (Billy Seymour) is a young man in prison.  He has poured scalding hot water on another prisoner, but was that for whom the hot water was actually intended?  The drama also starred Rupert Halliday-Evans.  Jack was also very good. There is a similar sleight-of-hand at work here as in the last episode.  Jack (Michael Schaffer) gets pulled in because apparently he was shoplifting.  A lot of time and effort is expended on whether Jack was actually intending to shoplifting or whether it was a mistake.  Both stories were directed by Mary Peate.  

19 Weeks by Emily Steele also made me cry.  In this very intimate and rather warts-and-all drama (which is highly radiogenic), Steele (Eve Myles) is a journalist in her thirties with one son already, Frank.  Her pregnancy with her second child is murderous, with her being incredibly sick all the time.  Chris, her husband, a silent character whose dialogue is reported via Emily (an interesting device) works but is caring, always trying to help Emily during her pregnancy.  Living in Australia, they do lots of tests, some of which they have to pay for, as they eventually find out that the child is likely going to have developmental problems, just like Emily’s uncle.  Emily is determined not to end up like her grandmother, who lavished her life on bringing up a developmentally disabled child.  It’s late (19 weeks) when the tests point in all likelihood to this possibility, and Emily describes the painful and long process of the termination, maturely, with vulnerability, and a great deal of honesty.  There are some excellent moments here—Emily dreads telling her mother about the decision given her mother used to campaign against abortion, but she finds her mother has changed.  I was crying not because Emily decided to have the abortion, but I was just sad about the whole story, the pain and suffering so many of the characters went through.  Eve Myles did an excellent job, as did the other actors, who included Vanessa Hier, Mafreeda Hayes, Carlie Hughes, and Milo Robinson.  It was directed by Helen Perry.