... Views from the battle lines BY MOIRA PETTY The reverberations of the dirty business that is war, of hopefulness outdone by hopelessness, echoed through two dramas that on the surface had little to link them. Silver's City (R4, Monday, April 24) on Loyalist Belfast was a hard thriller with a soft centre that turned out to be hard after all. Gary Mitchell's Stranded (R3, Saturday, April 29) was ...

... Opening up all the old wounds BY MOIRA PETTY Television's VE Day coverage caught the national mood of unconfined joy, even if it was tempered with snatches of solemn remembrance. It was left to radio, as ever, to probe beneath the flag-waving surface with a series of special sions wnicn closed tne gap between 1945 and 1995 but opened up the scars. Best of the dramas was Nick Stafford's The ...

... A woman of substance By MOIRA PETTY I am grief stricken. You find a playwright who really is the business, then you leam she's been dead for 200 years. Catherine Trotter is wicked in both the colloquial and literary senses of the word. She was the feminist enfant terrible of Restoration drama. with the wit of Dorothy Parker, the polemics of Julie Burchill, and was only 21 when Love at a Loss ...

... Raunchy tales of innocents abroad By Moira Petty Restoration theatre's role as the carry On drama of the 17th century-but with a more caustic inderbelly-was perfectly delin eated in a quite delicious production of Wycherley's The Country wife (BBC Pebble Mill for R3, Sunday, June 4). The production fused a musi- ;al score by Malcolm McKee vhich underlined the capers with a bathos of its own, ...

... Russell finds a new home By MORIA PETTY Ken Russell has always wrapped his subject matter in a fanfare of effects but the visual sense has predominated. Unable to get his screenplay on the life of mystic Russian composer Scriabin on to film, he has turned to radio for the first time, writing and directing The Death of Alexander Scriabin (R3, Sunday, June 18). The ques tion loomed. How would ...

... Shorn's satirical edge was a cut above BY MOIRA PETTY Psychobabble rabble, the slavering rent-a-quote hardliners and the less than acute media analysis which so often accompanies the practice of crime and punishment, was the subject of an inventive satirical drama by Tony Duarte for the commercial work. Shorn (Independent Radio Drama Productions for London Newstalk, Saturday. June 24), set ...

... When the drama is all in the voice By Moira Petty Fat, pretty, sinister, sexy-- such visual considerations mean nothing when the actor is cast in a radio play. Here the voice itself must bring us the corpulence, the boniness, the plainness, as a component of the character. But are radio drama directors really free to cast against type, and if they do, what battles will rage within the brain ...

... Sounds of the saddest of themes BY MOIRA PETTY It is odd how beauty can be crafted out of ugliness, sadness out of laughter. Two plays last weekend, linked by a strongly atmospheric use of music and ambient sound, deliberately mismatched style and content with gut-wrenching effect. There was an oriental serenity to H: A Hiroshima Story (BBC North for R3, Sunday, August 6) which belied its ...

... A frenzied musical inspiration BY MOIRA PETTY Music, so often the accompaniment or the counterpoint to radio drama, is also one of its great themes. On the surface, at least, the explanation would appear obvious. All the ingredients for illustrating such a piece are more readily avail able than. say. a play seeking to probe the art of painting. And yet, in many cases, a musical theme gives ...

... Saint loses out to Loretta BY MOIRA PETTY It is a little disturbing that I was most taken, in Saint Overboard (R4, from Monday, August 28), not with the figure of suave sleuth and safe-cracker, Simon Templar, but with his fleetingly featured girlfriend, Loretta Page. It was not that I disliked Paul Rhys' tation of Leslie Charteris' hero, indeed he suffused Templar's vowels and actions with ...

... Irish radio excellence For me, this year's radio drama highlight has not been any of the carefully circumscribed seasons but the outpounng of Irish writing. Irish radio plays have proved both revelational and entertaining. Now. in the First Bite season, which showcases new writers, comes another prodigiously tal ented Irish writer. Pearse Elliott, a 24-year-old civil servant, based The ...

... Shock reaction to Barker's violent and beautiful tale BY MOIRA PETTY Howard Barter's raucously invigorating play. Victory (R3, Sunday, October 1) came with a ready made controversy and a subtitle that neatly summed it all up- Choices in Reaction. His Hogarthian tale of the progress, not of a rake, but of the widow of a revolutionary in the post Restoration days of the 1660s. detiberatery ...