Cate Blanchett to the rescue
As Radio 4 commits to 90-minute dramas, an Oscar-winner steps forward. But lately there's been some excellent shorter-form work too.
Alfred Hitchcock’s decree that the length of a film should be “directly related to the endurance of the human bladder” no longer really applies now that so much entertainment is home entertainment and we can pause movies whenever we feel like it, but we all know that there are artistic benefits to working within limits. You need enough room but you also need constraints, and lately the question of what timeframes work best in radio drama has been engaging the attention of everyone involved in the business.
That the axing of Radio 3’s Drama on 3 caused such dismay — the topic of an earlier post, Words and Music — wasn’t just about the blow it delivered to performers and writers. It was about the loss of a canvas on the scale that the slot offered. That was 90 minutes, sometimes more. The protests and the petitions very much focused on this aspect of the decision — pressure which led Radio 4 to announce last month that 90-minute dramas would live on, on a monthly basis.
The speed and suddenness of the reprieve was such that Radio 4 didn’t actually know what productions would fill the slot (slated for Saturday afternoons), but in a sense they got lucky in happening to have a brand new 90-minute work already in the can, and one that carried a great deal of prestige. This was The Fever — a monologue by Wallace Shawn performed by no less a figure than Cate Blanchett, which had been brought to Radio 4 by the great theatre director John Tiffany.
The Fever aired yesterday, and for an hour and a half across a Saturday afternoon, Radio 4 yielded to the mesmerising presence of the two-times Oscar winner as she took on the role of an unnamed traveller holed up in a hotel room in an unnamed war-torn country.
Blanchett’s character’s thoughts start to unravel as she contemplates her privileged place in the world.
“I’m doing my best to be a good person. I make jokes to the cleaner, the car park attendant.”
“My sympathy for the poor doesn’t change the life of the poor.”
“I could decide to fight on the side of the poor, but would I chain myself to a building?”
Memories of childhood Christmases mingle with the contemplation of the horrors of torture.
The work dates back to 1991 when Shawn gave private readings of it to small gatherings. In 2009 there was a highly regarded production at the Royal Court, starring Clare Higgins. Somewhat prolix, and withholding of dramatic twists, The Fever was intimate, intense, disturbing, chilly, its only character less than sympathetic, and if Blanchett really is about to give up acting (which is what she told Radio Times in a recent interview), it’s interesting that she should choose such a cathartic, no-man-is-an-island piece as one of her final projects.
She performed it immaculately, the length of the production giving it an accumulative power. Could it have worked at an hour? Yes, possibly. But just as The Fever is a big statement, so too is Radio 4’s commitment to 90-minute dramas. A Shakespeare over that time period will rattle along.
One of the campaigners to whom enormous credit must go for persuading Radio 4 of the importance of maintaining 90-minute drama slots is Nicola Baldwin, chair of the audio committee of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and as it happens, one of Nicola’s own plays — We The Young Strong — just aired on Radio 4, one of a cluster of very fine recent productions of plays either foreshadowed or shadowed bythe Second World War.
We The Young Strong, a vivid depiction of the rise of British fascism in the 1930s, was daring in seeking to explore how young people got caught up in political extremism. I would also strongly recommend Martin Jameson’s The Film, which told the story of how, in 1945, Alfred Hitchcock helped create a coherent film out of the overwhelming (in every sense) footage that Ministry of Information cameramen shot at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the Allies had liberated it.
It was also 1945 when JB Priestley’s classic play An Inspector Calls premiered in Moscow. Why there and not somewhere in the UK? Mark Burgess’s An Inspector Calls on Moscow, starring Rory Kinnear as Priestley, provided an entertaining and revealing answer.
All three of these plays ran for either 45 minutes or an hour. Now Radio 4 is in the market for 90-minute work, a topic covered by the most recent edition of Radio 4’s Feedback, with contributions from Nicola Baldwin herself as well as the BBC’s head of audio drama Alison Hindell. To anyone following this whole saga, that too is well worth a listen.
I actually have a 90-minute suggestion for Radio 4, which is a brilliant production I saw in the West End the other evening — Retrograde, by Ryan Calais Cameron, centred on a key moment in the career of the actor Sidney Poitier. A three-hander, its themes of racial prejudice and political paranoia were incredibly resonant, but above all the writing was just so sharp — Ryan Calais Cameron really is an amazing talent — and I came away thinking, this would make a great radio play. Length-wise it’s bang on. Surely someone at Radio 4 has clocked it.
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About as far away from all that as you could possibly get … Tony Blackburn presents a documentary on Radio 2 tonight (Easter Sunday) about the moment in Beatles history which you could argue marked the precise birth of Beatlemania — 2 February 1963 and a show they appeared in at the Gaumont Cinema in Bradford.
Radio Times gave me the opportunity to interview Tony ahead of the programme, and the conversation covered not just his connections to the Beatles but quite a bit else, not least what keeps him doing what he does (with two current shows on Radio 2) at the age of 82. He was a delight to talk to, and the interview includes a story about Blackburn’s friendship with Noel Edmonds that is very funny and rather touching. Here’s the piece:
https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/radio/tony-blackburn-brass-beatles/