Where are the proper radio heroes when you need them?
We take radio plays for granted. On a particularly dark afternoon on Radio 4 we may even think, listening to yet another intent exploration of regional, racial or sexual identity, there are altogether too many of them. But remember three things: 1) The number of people listening to one Afternoon Drama would fill all of the auditoriums in the National Theatre for a whole year; 2) Radio drama has discovered more new writers (and sustains more established ones) than TV or theatre; and 3) Once a year, TV may trumpet a glossy adaptation of a lonely classic but only on radio, year in and year out, will you regularly find dramatisations of the world’s great literary canon, Austen to Zola.
And so to The Scarlet Pimpernel
(Radio 4, Sunday), Baroness Orczy’s 1903 play that became a novel (1905), made her fortune and arguably established the whole genre of secret heroes who conceal good deeds by masquerading as aristocratic idlers. By the time Orczy died in 1947 her hero, Sir Percy Blakeney, alias the Scarlet Pimpernel, had already been read, seen on stage and on screen (both as a silent movie and talkie) by international millions. I grew up with him on BBC radio, where he has darted about for decades.
This new two-part version, written and directed by Jonathan Holloway, is sexy, earthy and mildly parodic, which was a slight shock, but, on reflection, may be only natural seeing the story is so familiar and has, over the years, been lovingly sent up many a time, by everyone from Daffy Duck to Blackadder. The title role is taken by star actor James Purefoy, whose vocal versatility encompasses both the languor of Sir Percy and the ardour of his secret quest to do the right thing by endangered aristocrats in revolutionary France. If that sounds ironic, that’s how this version appears, more panto than thriller. It’s fun, so everyone overacts a bit to let you know it. I rather hanker for proper heroes.
Luther, John Osborne’s 1961 play, was Radio 4’s Saturday Drama. It was a bold choice but a good one, not just to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing to a church door his objections to corrupt Catholic practice (thus triggering the Reformation) but because radio fits this tricky play like a handmade glove. Why? Because, in a good production, we concentrate as the voices unfold the story, embodying both outer arguments and inner worlds of dreams, hauntings, visions.
Osborne’s Luther is plagued by doubts and questions. He’s a brilliant scholar with a poor, rough, resentful father. Church superiors admire his brilliant brain but fear the force of his logic. Admirers wish he would be easier on himself and the church. Enemies want him out of the way. His body plagues him almost as much as his mind. Harry Lloyd, in the title role here, was superb throughout. In an astutely chosen cast, both David Troughton, as Tetzel, the corrupt seller of indulgences, and Adrian Scarborough as Staupitz, Luther’s staunchest clerical friend, shone. Producer and director Clive Brill gave Osborne’s script new life, real power.
Marcy Kahan is a dramatist who likes to take her characters on walks across reality. I love her work. She is funny, allusive, fanciful, observant. In the past she has imagined Noël Coward as a detective and, for the duration of each play, I believed it. She did those lovely two-handers, Lunch, about a man and a woman who are just friends (not lovers, although we wonder about that). She wrote Five Lessons for Maureen Lipman, playing a writer learning the piano. Kahan makes me laugh, frees me up.
On Sunday night, Radio 3 broadcast her Ninety Minutes with Stanislavski and I wafted with her as magically as if we were two people in a Chagall painting. Wait, make that eight people or, if you were listening too, nine. Here’s why.
Six American actors – some famous (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler), five of them ghosts – are caught between the past and the present when a TV star has a last-minute panic about performing Chekhov on the London stage. One by one, they materialise to help. Mostly they talk about themselves but, as they do, they explore various truths. Did Strasberg really learn “the method” from Stanislavski? And what makes acting real?
Some plot, eh? Well, actually, it was. Kahan’s characters were handtailored. The real actors breathed life into the ghostly ones. Stanislavski turned up at the end to set it all to rights. I laughed lots. There will have been lots more than nine of us listening, by the way, and happy to be.