1.0 What is the radio play?
There are an enormous number of radio plays and that provokes a need for theoretical explanation. I will restrict myself here to some aspects prompted by the drama curriculum: words or sounds? (1.1), the Englishness of radio drama (1.4), and words and 'mise en scène'(1.5).
1.1 The word lobby and the sound brigade
In one of her thoughtfully succinct radio columns in 'The Guardian', now regretfully no more, Anne Karpf summarised radio drama styles:
Exponents of radio drama … seem to fall into two camps - the word lobby and the sound brigade.
And she quotes from B.B.C. director Jeremy Mortimer, responsible for 'art' plays:
Radio plays are too often packed with words, as if the writer is desperate to fit in as much information as possible to compensate for not having pictures. But one of the sounds you need in radio drama is silence. Radio is very much like film in its perspective and depth of focus - you can zoom in to things and then leave it quiet.
(Karpf 1994)
Jeremy Mortimer refers here to what I call the 'filmic' directing style in radio drama. It offers more sound scenery, and accentuates sound perspective and the 'mise en scène'. It pulls these other aspects to the 'front' of the sound picture, rather than keeping the words solely in the foreground and the location dimly in the background. The director can edit sound 'shots', partly through differing microphone positions. The 'filmic' can reproduce in some respects film's 'look' - a sensation in the listener that it is she or he who is producing the sound pictures and tracking glances to their targets. Radio 'filmic' direction can also work through the interiorizing monologue (the voice in the mind or what film terms 'internal focalization'), through cross-cutting the monologue with realistic dialogue (a technique at which Jeremy Mortimer is particularly skilled) and also through distanciating devices. (An application of this analysis is in Beck, 2000, 'Listener positioning'.)
More adventurously, a 'filmic'-style radio director can introduce textures and layering of sounds, multiple perspectives and the range of formalist techniques that are now so popular in feature films, partly because of digital production. Unfortunately, experiments like this are all too few.
1.2 'Word lobby' and radio dialogue
But the 'word lobby' is often splendidly successful. Most of radio drama's gestures in time and space are verbal. Suiting the main genres broadcast, characters are usually highly articulate. Radio characters assault and interrogate language at the level of the word; while in the sight/sound media, subtext and the gaps between words run parallel. Note 1
Often, radio characters use word tricks and wit, which disrupt dialogue by denying its logic. Their rhythms are those of the continuous sonic stream of radio, neither the many varied tempi of real-life interaction nor the tempi of film and stage. Whereas verbal discourse in radio drama must be over-determined to compensate, its space and time are, by contrast, inherently ambiguous and often opaque. There is an in-built tension here, and another reason for the nearly total foregrounding of the verbal in microphone positions 1, 2 and 3 (Beck, 1997, 48-57).
Hence the speed of standard B.B.C. production. This is half an hour broadcast product for a day in the studio - suited to the word-based skills, training and praxis of the British, 'cool', technique actor, and resistant to other systems. Obvious examples of these latter include living the life of the character, working inside-out, extensive table work, improvisation, as also the high-energy vocal stream of the American Wooster Group.
1.3 Dialogue and the pre-verbal
The radio 'mise en scène' most often forces characters into close-up but denies them contact other than verbal proximity. However, the degree of mediation in words and dialogue is irreducible in radio which, in some respects, is a transparent vehicle for their broadcast. We live in the moment-to-moment semantics and emotions of the characters. But this is at a level of awareness in character presentation and construction where what is available is almost only that which can be readily translated into words.
Radio drama dialogue cannot reach down into the pre-verbal, the mental events that happen out of our reach in the head. They are there in that level of the unconscious where instincts and repressions war with each other. Then they rise to a higher level, that is up and out through the filtering managements of the ego and the super-ego. The mind processes of radio characters must be always and immediately accessible to conscious perception, and not primarily realised by action.
But down there, in each fictional character, there is psychic space, discrete and with its own pathology and Freudian drives. Of course theatre has often reached there and Expressionist drama is an obvious example. The task of the radio actor is to not just to lift the words off the page, but to give us some sense of the spaces between the words. And of course radio drama can be at its most exciting when it verges on the (aurally) non-representational. (See Miller 1974, for example, on the limits of the verbal in Pinter's radio plays, and Herman, 1995, 223-240, on ‘The Trials of Communication’, using material from ‘Othello’ etc.)
1.4 Radio drama and Englishness
What is obvious here, through its seventy-five years and more, and from its birth in Shakespeare and stage adaptations, is that B.B.C. radio drama is the parallel product to the English stage where language predominates. Often, as in the almost continuous tradition back to Renaissance theatre, those characters whose words are the most powerful are the ones who dominate the territory represented by the stage space. Note 2
Here is a link with the unitary constructedness of English (and maybe British and Irish) culture across radio and stage: it is its use of the verbal as defining the performance space. We can talk of 'on' and 'off', but that is to do with visual design, and computing lighting boards of theatre. What culturally maps out the 'open space' of both stage and radio - to adapt director Peter Brook's famous book title for the playing area as defined not by scenography but by actors - is the reliance on words (sometimes called the verbocentric) and the assault on language. Hence, I would argue, the Englishness of radio drama as we experience it from the dominant position of the B.B.C. and its history - a cultural construct in a medium and in forms which are irreducibly its conduit.
1.5 Words defining the radio 'mise en scène'
Again let me draw a contrast with scenography. The stage place makes visible some historical and geographical coordinates. An example is the opening of the second act of Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard': the painted backdrop with electric pylons and its clash with the past, the neglected Orthodox shrine in mid-stage. Characters play against the silent witness of the scenography, sometimes a total environment and a determinant of action. (This happens so often in Ibsen and Arthur Miller, as other examples, and one is reminded of Michael Chekhov's 'atmospheres'.) Further, the theatre spectator's normal relationship is visually bound to the horizontal plane formed by cyclorama and playing area, which also provides a dimension against which to place the actors.
Radio scenography is both more fluid and more confined, and more 'degraded'. No radio production of 'The Cherry Orchard' can resound with the ongoing power of that determinist scenography. So the predominating principle of radio drama's 'mise en scène' is that the verbal defines the 'space'. The actors' moment-to-moment energising of language creates ambience and location, and SFXs (sound effects) are, by comparison with the sight/sound media, never more defining than a mere 'envelope'.
Radio perspective is drastically fore-shortened and the dialogue (positions two and three) simulates a paraproxemic (see Glossary) relationship with the listener, giving the sound picture equivalent of the 'head-and-shoulders' close-up shot. 'Near' can be represented with great clarity, detail and vocal colouring, while 'off' is a background soundscape or various SFXs, or characters in short outbursts of shouting. Middle ground is much more difficult to represent and often does not 'appear'. Radio drama characters rapidly make their way from position five, 'moves off', to position three, conversation, while in the overall aural environment or sound picture, all is usually structured into strict foreground-background. Exceptions are an actuality, raw directing style, possibly on location, or the filmic, with, for example, an aural, 'art'-ful equivalent to film's long, continuous, moving 'mise en scène' shot, suggested by director Jeremy Mortimer in the quote above.
At the other end of the stage and film spectrum is the verbally-challenged Method character. See Counsell on linguistic failure in the Method 'proletarian hero' (Counsell, 1996, 67-70). BACK
I have found Robert Wood's book very useful in defining this - Some necessary questions of the play. A stage-centered analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet (Wood 1994). See also Herman, 1995, 48-60, 'Verbalizing Space', on verbal and non-verbal means of signifying stage space. BACK
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