My new radio drama BREAKING POINT is broadcast on Friday, 10th August, 9pm, on Radio 4…(For further info, see the blog ON THE RADIO DRAMA EXPERIENCE.)
If you miss it, you get another chance to listen via the BBC’s wonderful Listen Again facility. For those who haven’t used it before, just go to the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) and scroll down to Radio, then click on ‘Listen to shows you’ve missed.’ Then click on Radio 4, and scroll down the list of shows until you reach The Friday Play (under ‘f’). The programme will be available on the internet for a week after its broadcast (TX) date.
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Great play. Chilly.
Thank you.
I’m a great fan of theatrical drama as well as of radio plays, and I have to tell you that this is easily some of the very finest that I’ve heard of the latter OR of drama in general in a very long time. The worst I can say is that it’s not quite perfect (the singular stale bit may have been the dialogue between Starkey and Reynolds regarding the Stupid Interrogator technique and the latter’s use of it on his relatives, which seemed the only really markedly ‘stagey’ piece), but for a dramatic piece designed to fit perfectly into a 57-minute slot, it’s pretty damn near close. The best I can say about it is that, in a very particular and stunning way, you have out-Pintered some of Pinter (and this is not praise I or, I think, anyone else who knows theatre, should give lightly). I would be very surprised were you not familiar with his own recent plays of similar themes (Mountain Language, The New World Order, et al.), but I think you have taken these themes and managed to make them felt by an audience in a much more visceral and immediate way that Pinter could not (these recent plays did, for all their craft, come off, in general, far less effectively than they should have) by translating them over into a starkly frightening personal-life situation (not unlike Pinter’s earlier work; I think very much of perhaps his greatest play for radio, A Slight Ache). It was a piece with a tremendously terrifying atmosphere balanced against keen psychological (and, of course, not entirely unpolitical) insight, and stands out markedly, I would say, from the rest of contemporary drama.
But enough essay-writing. I’m not being paid by the word, despite the appearance of it. My congratulations to you on a marvelous piece of writing. I’m not sure if you’ve writen any more stand-alone drama (I see reference to a piece called Blame, but nothing more), but I can tell you that I look forward very eagerly to anything you might produce in the future. Kudos to you, sir! And my greatest appreciation.