Download The invisible theatre of radio drama

WILLIAM STANTON
The invisible theatre of radio drama
In many respects, the notorious 1938 radio production by Orson Welles’s
Mercury Theatre of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was an experiment in
invisible theatre for radio. Discussing invisible theatre as an overlooked
form in general and Augusto Boal’s version in particular, Martin Kohtes
suggests that ‘Boal overlooks the fact that his technique [of Invisible
Theatre] also relies on the provocation of an emotional response (indignation, shock, pity) in order to engage the onlooker in the action’.1 In this
respect, he suggests, it is in the Aristotelian tradition rather than the
Brechtian, as Boal claims. Radio drama, differently invisible, could be
described in a similar way, although the flexibility of the medium lends
itself to adopt, adapt and combine forms and genres, sometimes within a
single production. Without doubt Welles’s War of the Worlds produced
action, in the form of widespread panic. This seems to have derived from
the belief on the part of many listeners that what they were hearing was
real; that is, not drama, nor even documentary, but news.2 Perhaps those
listeners who took to their cars were caught out by naı̈vety, a credulity
created by inexperience of radio drama; a failure to realise that while the
infant radio theatre (like the early cinema) had tropic relations with the
stage, it was also profoundly different. Perhaps, too, as can happen in other
forms of invisible theatre, they felt alienated from the actors and the event,
from what Susan Melrose has called ‘theatre’s felt specificity’.3
Now, after eighty years of radio drama from the BBC, we can hardly
listen in innocence – and in any case the reverberations of that 1938 War of
the Worlds would ensure that such devices could hardly be used again. Now
we listen with our ears open, so to speak, our senses prepared – and yet
we are more separated from each other than in any form of dramatic
performance. Whether listening at home or in a car, we are unaware in any
physical way that we are part of an audience numbering hundreds
of thousands. Whether alone or with one or two others, we cannot be
positioned – physically or psychologically – in a way that is as specific as in
a theatre building or a street or a chosen site, as members of a collective.
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Moreover, unlike the acts of reading or spectating, in radio drama there is
no object for our gaze. The actors are invisible; the scenography exists only
in our minds; the drama plays in landscapes of words and what Alan Beck
has called ‘acousmatic’ sound, ‘a sort of sonic back-drop or envelope in the
outer frame: seagulls heard but not ‘‘seen’’, rain and traffic outside the
house, and thunder’.4 We are not engaged with the specular but the oral
and aural and we are required to use our imagination in a different way
from any other kind of performance. Our complicity in radio drama is as
active makers of meaning and the site of the drama is an internal world, as
Frances Gray and Janet Bray describe it in their discussion5 of radio drama
fourteen years after Martin Esslin’s review of the medium. In that essay he
wrote, ‘Concentrated listening to a radio play is thus more akin to the
experience one undergoes when dreaming than to that of the reader of a
novel: the mind is turned inwards to a field of internal vision’.6
Pleasure of bricolage and jouissance
Describing the pleasure of watching a piece of theatre, Anne Ubersfeld7
reminds us of Brecht’s view that it is, or should be, a process of sensual as
well as intellectual engagement. Perhaps she has in mind Brecht’s statement
in A Short Organum for the Theatre that it’s the job of the ‘sister arts of the
drama’ to ‘entertain the children of the scientific age, and to do so with
sensuousness and humour’.8 In Ubersfeld’s essay the sister arts are
characterised as bricolage, reflecting the idea that a performance is an
assemblage of different elements; and this reminds us, too, of the discussions
Brecht constructs between theatrical co-workers in The Messingkauf Dialogues.9 For Ubersfeld, it is not only theatre makers whose collective trades are
like bricolage: the spectator, too, is a bricoleur, a kind of DIY enthusiast who
‘enjoys the specifically theatrical pleasure of doing ‘‘his own thing’’ with the
elements offered to him’.10 This seems consistent with Roland Barthes’s
notion that a text is a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash’.11 Barthes is writing about the
intertextuality of literary inscriptions, claiming that it is the reader, not the
author, who constructs the text; who plays pleasurably (jouissance, he writes,
evoking erotic pleasure too) within the text, which is ‘that space where no
language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate’.12 Writing in
the early 1980s, Ubersfeld summons a poststructuralist turn: the shift of
attention from author to reader. In a passage that echoes other poststructuralist writing – in particular Derrida and Lacan’s notion of ellipsis, or
decentring – she states that ‘the relationship between the spectator’s desire
and the stage is one of endless wandering but also one of permanent
96 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
frustration. And it is not desire alone that is frustrated; the totality of the
stage space is the object of demands that cannot be met’.13 Does this signal
the end of bricolage, just at that point where we might have thought we had
a handy metaphor? Or is there a kind of bricolage that contradicts our
customary expectation of a self-assembled object (the goal of our desire) and
offers instead the ‘endless wandering’ of assembly and deconstruction?
Radio performance
‘Radio is elliptical, incomplete, metonymic’, writes Alan Beck.14 And of
course invisible, as we have noted. Actors’ voices, sound effects and acoustics
fill the room or car where we are listening, but there is no site
or space of performance into which we direct our gaze. Here is a sense
of ellipsis (and incompleteness): there are no actors’ bodies and no
scenography. Yet, when we listen, the actor’s voice stands for the body and
we execute this metonymy automatically, constructing a physical identity on
the basis only of what we hear. This is a complex oral and aural phenomenon
that derives from the dynamics of the spoken voice itself, the way the actor
has ‘pitched’ to the microphone. Added to this is the quality of sound created
in the studio by the use of acoustic baffles (portable screens, drapes), plus
sound effects added on the spot (‘Spot F/X’), plus atmosphere generated by
the simultaneous addition of treatment (echo, reverberation, distortion),
plus the sort of ‘out-of-frame’ acousmatic effects mentioned above. The mix
of these elements is made, during a take, through the multi-channel mixing
desk (the ‘Panel’), but the director also has the option of remixing and
adding further atmosphere, effects and music during the editing process.
The way the actor speaks the lines constitutes a textual reading, a
negotiation as happens in other types of performance between the written
text, the actor and the director. It is a given circumstance that the actor is
speaking to an invisible audience (of one) via a microphone, which also
imposes its own disciplines as to speed of delivery, articulation, dynamic
and so on. This influences ‘pitching’, or the physical relationship between
actor and microphone. The effect of intimate physical presence (we are
inside their head) is achieved by proximity to the microphone and also the
use of the acoustic baffles or sometimes a small anteroom with a dry
acoustic. On the other hand, if actors are supposed to be calling someone
from the far end of a corridor, they stand at some distance from the
microphone and ‘pitch’ their voices in something approaching a shout.
The amount of effect added to the recorded voice by the studio manager at
the Panel is agreed with the director at the time, in the knowledge that
adjustments can be made later, during the edit.
The invisible theatre of radio drama 97
Proxemics exist, too, and are created by the physical relationship of two
or more actors standing or sitting at microphones. On a stage, proxemics are
obviously an important performative dynamic, and we read the actors’
bodies in relation to each other as an integral part of the mise-en-scène. In
radio the experience is acoustic and the vocal dynamics, together with the
positioning of the actors in relation to the microphones, plus the way they
pitch the words, plus the various uses of acoustics and atmosphere, creates
a context in which the listeners construct the totality of the mise-en-scène.
And this includes our ‘seeing’ the actors’ bodies, too.
This may sound straightforward enough, but in the context of some
avenues of performance theory, to claim that radio drama generates a multilayered presence is to commit a poststructural heresy. Performance, like all
language, it is claimed, is subject to the play of signification, and thus has a
void at its (illusory) centre. Consider Philip Auslander’s question: ‘If our
perception of an actor’s work derives from this play of differences, how can
we claim to be able to read the presence of the actor’s self back through that
performance?’15 Behind Auslander’s deconstructions of presence lie
Derrida’s; and within them lies the belief that we are all supposed to have
recognised that ‘the center could not be thought in the form of a presentbeing, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but
a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of signsubstitutions came into play’.16 This causes him to coin the neologism
différance, a combination, as translator Alan Bass suggests,17 of difference
(inability to affix meaning to word) and deferral (the recession of synonyms
when definition is attempted). For Auslander, echoing Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics, the absence of centre (linguistic and ontological)
shows that performance (and its theory) is also subject to the endless play of
signification and so also lacks a centre. Reconsidering Stanislavski, Brecht
and Grotowski, Auslander finds in each case that the lens of deconstruction
reveals fatal flaws in that ‘all assume that the actor’s self precedes and
grounds her performance and that it is the presence of this self in
performance that provides the audience with access to human truths’.18
For, as he has already claimed on behalf of ‘semiotists who have studied
acting’, an actor performing on stage is ‘an opaque medium, an intertext’.19
I want to say, in response to Auslander’s question, that nowadays we
regard the claims of post-Stanislavskian acting with some scepticism; and
we don’t try to ‘read the presence of the actor’s self back through that
performance’. The notion of the actor’s own self – the personality of the
performer, the idea of them ‘laying it on the line’ in an emotionally
revealing or risky way as a criterion of truthful acting (as Auslander
suggests, quoting a remark by Joseph Papp) – is irrelevant, both to stage
98 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
and radio acting. This raises questions that go beyond the scope of this
essay; for example, whether anyone believes, as Auslander suggests for
the sake of his argument, that actors (following a selective reading of
Stanislavski) can actually reveal the inner truth of their own lives through a
character. And again, whether it’s any longer a tenable thesis that the
expression of total presence for the actor, going through and beyond
language to a realm of pure, visible psychic impulses (Grotowski), could
constitute a theatre that both showed and improved the human condition.
Auslander makes good points about the illusions of self-presence in
Stanislavski and Grotowski and the fact that Brechtian acting requires
the construction of a second fictional character that stands for the actorwho-knows. But he wants to go much further than this, showing that the
Derridean deconstruction of language and identity shows us that the play
of différance results in fallacious readings of performance (as well as other
forms of writing). The danger is that nothing can be said without falling into
more fallacies. He claims that, given the realisation of the loss of our
theatrical roots in authentic communal ritual and also the ‘realisation that
all is difference’20 – and given too (citing Derrida) the knowledge that we
cannot have ‘the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin’21 – we’re
left with two choices. One is to slide off into a kind of guilty nostalgia,
substituting the illusion of presence for lost religiosity (a massive assertion
in itself). The other is to follow Derrida into the kind of play that he posits as
the substitute for Lévi-Straussian structuralism. This is not of course play
in the sense of the theatrical but rather the linguistic – Derrida’s ‘play
of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be
conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence’.22
The best way I can understand this is to remind myself that much
poststructuralist theory is itself driven by nostalgia for the lost purity of
Surrealism – a dynamic world of expression that was supposed to escape
the straitjacket of différance – by swooping, untrammelled by Marxian
alienation, bourgeois mores or failed revolutions, down a grand boulevard
of pure enunciation connecting the unconscious with the conscious. It is
significant, I think, that Derrida takes up Freud’s speculations in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle concerning unconscious–preconscious–conscious connections, as we shall see.
The unconscious and the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’
We noted earlier that, in discussing the state of the art, Martin Esslin23
claims that listening to radio drama is more akin to dreaming than reading a
novel. Like any other form of drama, the radio play connects what is being
The invisible theatre of radio drama 99
said with the imaginary presence of the speaker(s) and the allusive
realisation of context. This itself is a subtle interaction of what we might call
aural scenography: evocation of place, which may be real or imaginary,
present or past; and atmosphere, which is an abstract evocation that may
stimulate a different kind of affective response from what is being said.
Lacan, taking his lead from Freud, observes that ‘the unconscious is
structured like a language’.24 The psychoanalytic process – the presentation
of self through the articulation of feelings, motivations, experiences and
dreams – takes place in verbal communication. But this is subject to the ‘law
of the signifier’;25 that chain of metonymy along which any fixed meaning
recedes. This, as Derrida also asserts, further adds to différance, in that ‘the
substitution of signifiers seems to be the essential activity of psychoanalytic
interpretation’.26 For Lacan, the process by which we recognise ourselves as
individuals, the ‘mirror stage’,27 is characterised not only by the onset of the
Oedipal crisis but also the recognition that the ‘I’ is decentred. In other
words (literally) ‘I’ cannot be fully and completely defined, but is subject to
the receding play of signification. Psychoanalysis proceeds, then, in a field
in which ellipsis, or what Lacan terms a ‘gap’ is already present.
‘Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence, something
stumbles’,28 he writes: for this is the nature of language – and of
consciousness. From this he concludes that the unconscious is structured
like a language: it can only be articulated in language; the subject of the
enunciation (‘I’) is, according to his extension and revision of Freud’s
theory, already decentred; and thus it is subject to the same law of the
signifier as language. ‘[T]he one that is introduced by the experience of the
unconscious is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture’.29 For Lacan, this
is what Freud saw and didn’t see: in the ‘stumble’ of language and
consciousness, in the ‘gap’, he looked for the unconscious, like a bridge.
In 1920 Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he offered his
interpretation of a small boy’s game of ‘Fort-Da’, a consolatory narrative,
using a spool of string, of his mother’s periodic disappearance and
reappearance. In this narrative – the child’s and Freud’s – Ann Ubersfeld
thought that Freud had ‘discovered the psychic root of theatrical pleasure:
what is there is not there; a sign, a substitute is there to stand for the object
of my desire, to give me a satisfaction both imaginary and real’.30 She might
also have noted that much naturalistic drama employs a similarly consolatory
narrative, in which something or someone is lost, and then found again.
Freud’s essay formed part of his work on the unconscious, in which he
remained engaged for thirty years; and part of its scope was to attempt an
explanation of ‘A condition [that] has long been known and described
which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and
100 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of
‘‘traumatic neurosis’’. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a
great number of illnesses of this kind’.31 In other words, what we now call
post-traumatic stress. Discussing cathexis, or the uncontrollable irruption of
images from the unconscious through the preconscious into the conscious
mind, Freud strove to understand how it could happen, in apparent
contradiction of his theory of repression – that is, the psychic process by
which, ‘Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the
pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle’.32 Freud, of course,
is interested in developing a neurological model to explain a psychotic
condition.
Later (1923), in a note on the same subject, which also has a bearing on
the interpretation of dreams, Freud states that images of this kind, breaking
through, as it were, to the conscious mind, do so by ‘becoming connected
with the word-representations corresponding to it’.33 Further on, having
re-established the importance for him of the notion of the memory trace,
he says, ‘The part played by word-representations now becomes perfectly
clear. By their interposition internal thought-processes are made into
perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the theorem that all knowledge has
its origin in external perception. When a hypercathexis of the process of
thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived – as if they came from
without – and are consequently held to be true’.34
Later again (1925), Freud provides a metaphorical model for the process
by which the memory trace becomes fixed. Discussing the idea that his
pocket notebook is ‘a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus’,35 he
reveals his fascination with a ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’. This is a simple device
(a child’s toy, in fact) consisting of a slab of resin or wax covered by a sheet
of thin transparent waxed paper, which is covered by a sheet of celluloid.
The waxed paper and celluloid sheets are joined along one edge and this
edge is fixed to one side of the wax base slab, so that the two leaves – paper
and celluloid – can be lifted away from the base and also separated from
each other. Using a stylus (rather than a pencil or pen), the face of the
celluloid is inscribed and what is written or drawn appears on the sheet of
waxed paper beneath it. But if the double sheet of celluloid and paper is
lifted away from the base slab, the writing disappears, leaving the Mystic
Pad free for more writing. There remains, however, an impression of the
inscription in the base slab, and if this is held at the correct angle to the
light, the trace of the writing can be seen. This, Freud says, is how ‘our
mental apparatus performs its perceptual function. The layer which
receives the stimuli – the system Pcpt.-Cs. [perception-consciousness] –
forms no permanent traces; the foundations of memory come about in other,
The invisible theatre of radio drama 101
adjoining, systems’.36 Although it is a neat metaphor, Freud immediately
notes that ‘once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot
‘‘reproduce’’ it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our
memory, it could accomplish that’.
It is this analogy, in Freud’s ‘Note Upon the ‘‘Mystic Writing Pad’’‘, that
Derrida seizes on in his essay ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ (1978), where
he deconstructs Freud’s thirty-year work that begins with a neurological
model of the unconscious and memory and ends with a metaphor of
resemblance, of writing. The memory trace breaches the repression of the
unconscious and forces a path through to the conscious. Derrida makes a lot
of the violence here: breaching, or effraction; and cathexis, or the charge of
psychic energy that raises, then expresses, the memory trace in language.
For him, the metaphor of the Mystic Pad is not a description of a palimpsest,
but a ‘system of relations between strata’.37 Thus Freud ‘joins the two
empirical certainties by which we are constituted: infinite depth in the
implication of meaning, in the unlimited envelopment of the present, and,
simultaneously, the pellicular essence of being, the absolute absence of any
foundation’.38 Here Derrida’s ‘pellicular essence’ echoes Freud’s connection
between his descriptions of the mind’s protective shield in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and his later description of the protective membrane of the
celluloid sheet of the Mystic Pad. And this is consistent with Derrida’s view,
stated earlier in the essay, that ‘the unconscious text is already a weave of
pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united – a text
nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction’.39 This raises,
then, for Derrida, the crucial link between writing as a function of
repression (in Freud) and the connection, throughout history, of writing and
erasure; writing and suppression. He concludes his essay on Freud with a
statement that surely demonstrates his nostalgic summoning of the ‘pure’
road of expression claimed for French Surrealism and its disciples. ‘How,
for example, on the stage of history, can writing as excrement separated
from the living flesh and the sacred body of the hieroglyph (Artaud), be put
into communication with what is said in Numbers about the parched
woman drinking the inky dust of the law; or what is said in Ezekiel about
the son of man who fills his entrails with the scroll of the law which has
become as sweet as honey in his mouth?’40
The sense of violence and loss in this discourse is inescapable. We read of
gaps, stumbles, effraction, and repression. We are told that what is there is
not there. And consciousness, like language, is a weave of traces: allusion
and misrecognition, illusion and delusion. Everything is subject to the
flickering play of the signifier; and the more we try to find stable meaning
102 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
or originary trace, the more we try to express experience through art, the
more we encounter existence as unstable, pellicular. And, at last, a history of
writing itself, Derrida claims, would show that it is repression (the cited
procedure in Numbers is at 5:12ff 41 and is in fact a superstitious ritual to
test a wife’s alleged adultery) from which we can only escape by some kind
of Artaudian once-only total performance ‘at the limit of theatrical
possibility’ that would simultaneously ‘produce and . . . annihilate the
stage’.42
A collaborative dramaturgy?
My concern about the Derridan position (and its extensions) is that, given
the repeated assertion that there is no origin or centre (and no metanarratives either), we must yield either to reactionary nostalgia (for
something that was false in the first place) or else play (which seems to
come down to another nostalgia, for the avant-garde and Surrealism). This
choice is supposedly forced on us when we realise that all of language and
consciousness and therefore art is constituted by nothing but the
evanescent, uncertain play of signification. At this point I have to say that,
as a writer, if I were inclined to believe that all my discourse was
circumscribed in this way, I wouldn’t try to write anything at all. I also have
to say, in summary for the moment, that radio production – writing, performance, reception – is fundamentally different from the stage and screen.
Perhaps radio drama contains something of what Walter Benjamin
once saw in French Surrealism’s potential for ‘profane illumination’,43 escaping, as it does, the anchorage of physical representation. Benjamin concludes
his 1929 essay with the view that Surrealism’s articulation of pessimism
in the face of bourgeois life is its potentially revolutionary power (despite the narcotic and sexual attractions of the Parisian private salons
where its exponents met and lived). ‘Surrealism has come ever closer
to the Communist answer. And that means pessimism all along the line.
Absolutely’.44 In 1929 much was still possible for those who hoped for
revolutionary social transformation, and Benjamin had hopes for Surrealism’s iconoclastic power, its ability to ‘liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moralhumanistic ideal of freedom’.45
I believe that the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture in late
capitalism46 shows that Benjamin’s admiration of anti-bourgeois, antiCatholic iconoclasm and his desire to see the destruction of the modernist
auratic work was mistaken; but that he was nevertheless right to see that
some of those ‘magical experiments with words’47 held a particular, rather
unbiddable kind of power. Perhaps, too, Derrida’s hopes ran the same way
The invisible theatre of radio drama 103
as Benjamin’s before him, and embraced the belief that French Surrealists
once held the key to the revolutionary transformation of society and art.
But, faced with the disappearance of the avant-garde and its incorporation
into capitalism; and faced, too, with the defeat of the French left in 1968,
nostalgia, regret and a deep loss of hope for a political praxis become
articulated in an account of language and thought as pellicular, fugitive,
and groundless.
My claim for radio drama is this. ‘Always already incomplete’ or not, there
is something like a ‘weave of pure traces’ in which voices, sounds and
atmosphere issue from boxes on a table, a wall, a car dashboard, into a
space that has become a transitory theatre. There is no one and nothing
present; and yet we actively construct a simulacrum, a fictional representation of reality. If Martin Esslin is right in suggesting that the experience of
listening to radio drama is akin to dreaming, we might ask whether we
populate our unconscious with the narratives coming from the impersonal
boxes of the loudspeakers; or whether what we encounter is some sort of
simulacrum of another, dreaming, mind. Perhaps some of the pleasure
consists in this, because a radio play is akin to going on a journey through
another unconscious – not the writer’s, nor the actors’, but a complex,
allusive acoustic bricolage. Perhaps we are drawn so easily and pleasurably
into this zone of possibility because it is personal, like dreaming – and also,
more practically, because it is here and now (we don’t have to go anywhere)
and also free. I believe that radio dramas exhibit the kind of significance
Aristotle attaches to fear and pity48 and are also capable of working like a
Brechtian epic – although the two are by no means mutually exclusive. In
this I am also staking my belief that they don’t exist in a spectral,
Baudrillardian limbo of simulation or postmodern pastiche.
At the end of a meditation on the ontology of performance, Herbert Blau
draws together his ideological point (a complicated thread that runs
through the book) about American theatre: ‘there is some point in
improving the quality of our illusions, out of which – if I can believe the
theatre – the theatre seems to be made: a somewhat utopian illusion on
which I stand my ground’.49 Within this discussion, reaching as it does a
conclusion that is obvious and unexceptionable, Blau considers a variety of
theatrical performance, mostly from the USA and France. At one point he
makes the claim that desire ‘has been after all, in the infinity of its
perspectives, the obsessive subject of the theater and, wherever it occurs
with any complexity, the impelling power of performance’.50 Although he
has nothing to say about radio drama per se, Blau’s claim has a bearing on
this discussion. It takes us back to Freud: not just Freud’s thoughts on
parapraxis, the stumble or slip that betrays, not the mouth of the Lacanian
104 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
void, but the unruliness, the will to expression, of desire itself. And this
reminds me, again, of the work of Howard Barker, whose plays engage
uncompromisingly with this traffic, or negotiation, or war, between desire
and its suppression; between the urge to speak and oppression; between (in
(Uncle) Vanya,51) the seductive force of despair and resistance to it. His play
Scenes from an Execution, about an artist’s desires for fame, sensual pleasure
and to show the truth in a painting, was first commissioned as a radio play,
as was The House of Correction.52 Dramatic poetry of the quality of Barker’s,
existing at it does at the margins of the representation of desire, generates
great power in the medium of radio precisely because we can (and must)
engage closely with the language, while still constructing the mise-en-scène
for ourselves. We realise, as we listen, that Barker is grappling with what
can barely be articulated; with what is normally silent; with what is desired.
In this respect, his plays exist in a territory that he strives to mark out
beyond (sometimes round, sometimes through) naturalism; and this works
just as well (perhaps better) within the flexibility of radio as on stage.
John Arden’s Pearl53 (1978) engaged its listeners in that same territory
between desire, its expression and political action. I remember particularly
the power of the presentation of seventeenth-century Irish oppression
through the interweaving of personal narratives, relationship dynamics
and the plays within the play. This was a drama written specifically and
uncompromisingly for radio and, as Mike Casey54 tells us, Arden refused
permission for the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage it. (Casey’s own
attempt to stage the play is interestingly documented in his article, a process that in effect had to reverse the nature of radio production and
performance.)
On the other hand, travelling from stage to radio, Simon McBurney’s
adaptation of Théâtre de Complicité’s stage play Mnemonic for Radio 3
(2002)55 takes us on a guided journey about and through memory that
demonstrates the pleasures of bricolage – a kind of dreamscape of narrative
possibilities. We travel back and down through layers of time, memory and
a personal story, connecting them together in a new perspective on Donne’s
observation that we are all related and no one can be isolated. Mnemonic
uses the drama both to tell and show a salutary thesis, that a 5,000-year-old
corpse found a few years ago frozen in a glacier is that of a man directly
related to us. At another level, the play works familiarly in the forensic
murder-mystery genre: whose is the body, who killed him, how? BBC Radio
3 commissioned the radio adaptation and this enabled the piece to reach a
larger audience and also to be developed for a medium highly suited to the
complex poetry and dramaturgy of multi-layering between narratives,
memories, dreams and desire and also rapid temporal shifting.
The invisible theatre of radio drama 105
In 2001 I wrote a play for BBC radio called Three Chickens; it was based on
a story I was told when I was working on a performance project in Brazil.
As soon as I heard the story (before even I supplied myself with a
Dictaphone and asked to be told it again) I knew I wanted to retell it as a
radio play. It was to do with the context of the telling, as well as the fact that
it was a traditional Azorean story that, for me, dealt both concretely and
metaphorically with two occluded tensions: a son’s desire to leave the
maternal home and be married; and the struggle of the new colony of Brazil
to separate itself from the Portuguese ‘mother’ culture. My play used a
layering of stories, one of which takes place in Brazil in ‘real time’ (that is,
the course of the play), during which the Azorean story is partly narrated
and also re-enacted. The other story – of the auditor’s mother and lover –
lies outside and behind the ‘real time’ narrative and is visited in flashbacks.
I can’t of course say whether the play worked in the way I envisaged it. It is
central to the way the medium operates that reading the text of the final
script can give only an oblique or partial sense of the play in performance
(which is true of all dramatic texts), but the text of Three Chickens can be read
on a website.56
‘What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the
reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection,’ Freud
announces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.57 And we are still speculating: a
radio play – invisible yet aural, allusive, affective – seems to work like a
memory trace, possibly like a dream. Its texts, borne on multi-layered aurality,
effracts the barriers of perception and the unconscious and irrupts into words,
into consciousness, where it engages our senses, memories, intellect and
emotions. No one is present: neither actors nor audience. The radio play
writes us, its auditors, just as it is written – not by the invisible author, but by
the interaction of the voices of actors who have already disappeared and
sounds that play across and within our memories. This remains its radical
power, just as much now as in the first broadcast of a radio play in 1924: a
collaborative dramaturgy that, at its best, generates an extraordinarily rich
intellectual, affective, sensual experience. No matter how unstable the chain of
signification may be, there is always a substitute there ‘to stand for the object
of my desire, to give me a satisfaction both imaginary and real’.58
Notes
1 Martin Maria Kohtes, ‘Invisible Theatre: Reflections on an Overlooked Form’,
New Theatre Quarterly, 9:33 (1993), 85–9 (p. 88).
2 See Graham Murdock in Peter Lewis, Radio Drama (London: Longman 1981),
154; and Howard Fink in Radio Drama, 222–3.
106 Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
3 Susan Melrose, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (London: Macmillan 1994), 8.
4 Alan Beck, ‘Point of Listening in Radio Plays’ (1998), in the Sound Journal (2002)
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/sdfva/sound-journal/beck981.html, section 8.
5 Frances Gray and Janet Bray, ‘The Mind as Theatre: Radio Drama since 1971’,
New Theatre Quarterly, 1:3 (1985), 292–300 (p. 294).
6 Martin Esslin, ‘The Mind as a Stage’, Theatre Quarterly, 1:3 (1971), 5–11 (p. 7).
7 Anne Ubersfeld, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, Modern Drama, 25:1 (1982),
127–39.
8 John Willett, Brecht on Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 204.
9 Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1965).
10 Ubersfeld, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, 131.
11 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 146.
12 Ibid., 164.
13 Ubersfeld, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, 138.
14 Beck, the Sound Journal, 2002, http://www.ukc.ac.uk/sdfva/sound-journal/
beck981.html, 4.4.1.
15 In Phillip Zarrilli (ed.), Acting (Re)Considered (London: Routledge 1995), 60.
16 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge
1978), 280.
17 Ibid., xvi.
18 Zarrilli, Acting (Re)Considered, 60.
19 Ibid.
20 Zarrilli, Acting (Re)Considered, 66.
21 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292.
22 Ibid.
23 Esslin, ‘The Mind as a Stage’.
24 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis (London:
Hogarth Press, 1977), 20.
25 Ibid., 23.
26 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 210.
27 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (London: Routledge, 1977), 1ff.
28 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Principles, 25.
29 Ibid., 26.
30 Ubersfeld, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, 135.
31 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1920–
22), 12.
32 Ibid., 10.
33 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1923–25), 20.
34 Ibid., 23.
35 Ibid., 227.
36 Ibid., 230.
37 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 227.
38 Ibid., 224.
The invisible theatre of radio drama 107
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
Ibid., 211.
Ibid., 231.
I located the passage cited by Derrida in the 1611 translation of the Bible.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 249.
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street (London: Verso, 1997), 227.
Ibid., 238.
Ibid., 236.
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge 1991).
Benjamin, One Way Street, 232.
Aristotle, Poetics (London: Penguin, 1965), 49.
Herbert Blau, To All Appearances (London: Routledge, 1992), 199.
Ibid., 83.
In Collected Plays, vol. 2 (London: John Calder, 1993).
Scenes from an Execution, BBC Radio 3, 1984, published in Collected Plays, vol. 2
(London: John Calder, 1990); The House of Correction, BBC Radio 3, 2000 and
toured in the UK by the Wrestling School, autumn 2001.
John Arden, Pearl (broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 1978; published London: Eyre
Methuen, 1979).
Mike Casey, ‘From Radio to Stage: A Production of John Arden’s ‘‘Pearl’’ ’,
Studies in Theatre and Performance, 20:3 (2000), 158–74 (p. 158).
Simon McBurney (with Théâtre de Complicité), Mnemonic, BBC Radio 3, 2 June
2002.
See William Stanton, Three Chickens, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3 October 2001.
The script can be read at: http://www.ex.ac.uk/drama/staff/radio/threechickens.
pdf.
Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 24.
Ubersfeld,‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, 135.