... Bar room banter mesmerises BY MOIRA PETTY Some of the greatest human dramas are encompassed in the most humdrum of activities. Conor McPherson's mesmeric play The Weir (R3. Sunday, March 8) is about the business of being mortal, the fragility of life. Even as a picture of cholia emerged, so did the heal ing nature of conviviality over a bottle. The more robustly human the craic the earthy, ...

... Getting to the heart of matters BY MOIRA PETTY Radio drama has, over the past fortnight, touched the very nerve centre of human relationships, poetically or comically, always tellingly. Gill Adams' idiosyncratic Jump to Cow Heaven (R4 Monday, March 30) was a comic love story, no less touching because of the dysfunctional nature of the participants. Mad Frankie (David Troughton) had escaped ...

... Bittersweet affair of the heart BY MOIRA PETTY Two major authors, writing nearly half a century apart, took adulterous love as the starting point for very different dissections of guilt, loyalty and faith. David Hare's Skylight (R3, Sunday, April 19), from the National Theatre, was a gripping, combative two hours. Kyra (Stella Gonet in a perfor mance of contained rage) had left her lover ...

... Purposeful play but too many ideas BY MOIRA PETTY A growing army of tremulousvoiced mutants is invading radio drama if recent productions are anything to go by. There has been a growing tendency to cast adults as children where these roles are peripheral to the play. The result often sounds like something from an alien civilisation, me purpose ful adaptation of Penelope Lively's novel City ...

... ...

... Of bards, beaus and broadcasters David Pownall's artfully ingenious play, An Ephiphanous Use of the Microphone (R4. Friday, May 15). was both a sly dig at radio broadcasting and a celebration of it. In wittily drawn parallel scenes, the writer compared the pressures surrounding the BBC's first live broadcast of a Shakespeare play, on May 28, 1923, with the chi canery that accompanied its ...

... A script and cast to kill for By MOIRA PETTY The Classic Serial rarely gets it wrong; but it gets it most right when it disinters a masterpiece with which most of us are not on intimate terms. Effl Briest (R4, from Sunday, May 24) is acknowledged as the opus major of 19th century German writer Theodor Fontane and this tisation by Hugh Morrison from his own translation captures it in ...

... Something novel on air BY MOIRA PETTY Dramatic tension is the keynote of Patrick Hamilton's novels and the reason why works like Rope and Gaslight have made such effective translations to stage, screen and radio. The Classic Serial's evocative production of West Pier (R4, from Sunday, June 14), part of the 1953 Gorse Trilogy, was insidi ously creepy, as the respective veneers of innocence ...

... A change for the better? By Moira Petty Mankind's feeble grip of the evolutionary ladder, and how easily we regress, is the theme of several plays. We change and develop. That's why we're not up in the trees with the monkeys, says one character in Neil Brand's drama on the demise of silent movies, Talkers (R4, Friday, June 26). Movie boss Jack Warner (Bradley Lavelle), touring America in ...

... Prejudice is food for thought BY MOIRA PETTY The straitjacket of unspoken fears, forcing a family into seclusion, was the moving theme of John Dodd Gets Taken for a Ride (Tight Assets Theatre for R4, Wednesday, July 8). Prejudice imagined was clearly worse than the prejudice that would have been experienced had John's family not decided to hide him away for more than 30 years. They put an ...

... Rockin' Good Fun Show Bridlington Over the years, the easygoing charm of fifties and sixties star Craig Douglas has not dimin ished. Nor has his equally pleas ant singing voice, and it is to him that the Rockin' Good Fun Show owes a great deal. A medley of his old hits seemed to warm the hearts of the hitherto unresponsive first night audience at the Spa, but having said that, the whole show ...

... Somebody has got it right BY MOIRA PETTY When the mannerisms and stylised gags of situation comedy are fused with sharp characterisation and a density of emotion, the result can be compelling entertainment. Liz Wainwright's superb Somebody (R4, Saturday, Jury 25) was not flagged as sitcom but the casting of Lynda Bellingham in the lead female role and the script's frothy humour led it in that ...