Quarter 4 Reviews- 014 Adaptation- New

014 Adaptation – New

Naturally, I have a great respect for Angela Carter’s radio writing, and I think she is unique among writers in the way her prose influenced her radio writing and her radio writing influenced her prose (I’m thinking principally of her 1976 radio drama Vampirella becoming “The Lady in the House of Love”).  And I’ve actually read The Bloody Chamber, which was adapted this Halloween in five parts by Olivia Hetreed and directed by Fiona McAlpine.  The adaptations are extremely successful at 15 minutes, wonderfully, sensually packed into that slot, well-directed, well-acted, and evocatively packaged.  Carter knew how to write erotically charged prose and radio, which comes across well here.  I remember being a little underwhelmed by the title story in the short story collection, but I really quite enjoyed the radio version.  It was an Allegra production with sound design by Lucinda Mason Brown.

I do believe that “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poem is well-nigh undramatizable, but despite that, I thought Anita Sullivan had an excellent stab at it as part of the series The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories.  There’s not a lot in the story for dramatization purposes, so adaptors since the 1930s on radio have had to get creative with their approaches.  In this version, the narrator’s dead wife haunts and torments him all the way to the scaffold.  It’s a tricky thing for radio, as if you faithfully tried to reproduce via sound effects all the cruelties the narrator inflicts on his cats, it would not only be aurally unbearable, but you would probably get a lot of audience complaints.  This adaptation fortunately walked that fine line carefully, giving the cats enough of a physical presence through a few sound effects and cat vocalizations without giving us the reality-based sounds which you would hear if someone actually removed a cat’s eye with a knife.  Strong performances also set off the essentially insane position of the narrator. It was a Sweet Talks production directed by Karen Rose.

I was quite impressed with Toby Hadoke’s dramatization of Nigel Kneale’s TV script, The Road.  Its central conceit is by now familiar to anyone (they even used it in a Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who) but in 1963, it would have been modern and arresting indeed.  I find Mark Gatiss’ “old man” acting to be quite irritating, though in the closing moments of this drama, he actually became reasonably convincing.  Set in the 1760s, its power is in the opposing temperaments of its characters, Gideon Cobb (Gatiss) and Sir Hassall (Adrian Scarborough).  Hassall tries to use scientific methods like electricity to detect ghosts; Cobb scoffs at him.  The intriguing Lady Hassall (Hattie Morahan) is not fleshed out enough and remains ambivalent regarding the experiments and the interventions of Cobb.  Perhaps the most interesting character is Jethro, Cobb’s black servant, very well-portrayed by Colin McFarlane.  Tetsy (Susan Wokoma) is the servant maid who, one year previously, had a vision/sound visitation of a road.  While there were rumors that the meadow was once a Roman road upon which Boudicca’s troops had fled, this is unsubstantiated and does not really fit Tetsy’s experience.  It’s nice to hear Ralph Ineson, as usual, though very much typecast as Big Jeff Beale, a servant. It was directed by Charlotte Riches.