... Complex maelstrom of motives By MOIRA PETTY Drama with a strong ethnic or regional flavour fares well on radio, its sense of its own roots giving it a purposefulness. The season of new American playwriting, broadcast under the banner New Found Land has been extraordinarily good, not least because of its breadth of interpretation of the American experience. Nearer to home, Ireland has been ...

... China old and new- a symbolic snoop BY MOIRA PETTY Gangster gunfire vying with the bars of Andrew Lioyd Webber musicals on opening night; corpses in hi-tech trainers, a manic glint in their dead eyes. These were some of the symbols of the New China as depicted in the 'colour' pieces of Shanghai journalist Lin Jun in John Fletcher's absorbing play DeadHne (R4, Thursday. October 16). Ordered ...

... There's a dry eye in the house By Moira Petty The ultimate weepie came to radio but left me dry-eyed. This was less an indictment of my stony-heartedness than the deliberately non-sentimental direction by Ned Chaillet of Love Story (R4, Saturday, August 30). Erich Segal's novel became a film which launched a trillion Kleenexes, but this radio adapta tion by Juliet Ace honed in on the couple's ...

... Comedy of Celtic cadences By MOIRA PETTY One of the great poets of rural Ireland, where Catholicism comes ready-mixed with Celtic superstition, was a sophisticated Anglo-Irish Protestant. JM Synge was encouraged by Yeats to reproduce that amalgam of musicality of speech and introspection of thought that characterised the Irish peasantry. This he did to best effect in The Playboy of the ...

... Provocative tale finds depth in age BY MOIRA PETTY Casual listeners, on the run perhaps from TV's relentless afternoon fare of lifestyle and staged confessionals, might have been shocked to stumble in daylight hours upon the libidinous All of Me Tempting (R4, Thursday, March 20). Passionate pensioners are much less of a rarity on radio than TV, the latter more interested in the aesthetics of ...

... Waves to fire the imagination BY MOIRA PETTY From the broad terrain of a road movie to the firings of thought and impulse inside one brain, radio drama is incomparably versatile, as demonstrated by two recently broadcast plays. The intimate, cortical ly-based drama. The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (R4. Monday, December 1) was adapted to great effect by Michael Boyd from the visceral novel by ...

... Terror submerged deep down The awful theme of the murder of one child by another was the springboard for a gripping investigation into childhood innocence and culpability in Killing Susan (R4, Thursday, July 3). Writer Vivienne Allen and director Peter Kavanagh handled their delicate subject matter with verve and without squeamishness. Davina (Poppy Keeling) recalled that far off day in ...

... Family drama in full flight By Moira Petty I have not read Sebastian Faulks' acclaimed novel of life and love around the time of the Prst World War, but a riveting radio serialisation of BMsong (R4, from Monday, October 27) made me want to do so immediately. The dramatisation by Nick Stafford, with direction by Claire Grove, began by lightly delineat ing the French household into which a young ...

... Friel makes good sense BY MOIRA PETTY Brian Friel knows that the greatest acts of heroism are contained in the smallest lives. The great Irish playwright never extends erudition into pretentiousness or self-insight into ennui. His penchant tor aeiivenng a series of neatly-interlocking set- pieces on apparently ordinary lives is seen again in Molly Sweeney (BBC Belfast for R3, Sunday, April 27) ...

... Victorian detail is invigorating By MOIRA PETTY Listeners who did not know Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (BBC Pebble Mill for R4, from Wednesday, December 25) may have turned on in anticipation of a chocolate box, bow-windowed haven of delight. wnat tney win nave got, instead, was a picture of Victorian poverty in which Little Nell and her profligate grand father trudged the ...

... Plenty captured on the run BY MOIRA PETTY During the past fortnight, the sensation of being plunged into an alien environment has been pursued on radio. There has been a parallel enquiry into the perils of life among your own, none more terrifying that Tanika Gupta's The Bounty Hunter (BBC Birmingham for R4, Thursday, June 26). It was based on true stories of the Asian runaway women who are ...

... Hard-boiled drama true to life By MOIRA PETTY The uneasy, discordant rhythms of everyday life are translated by Lee Hall--fast becoming radio's most exciting original dramatist--into plays which never pull their punches and characters who reel with the intensity of their experiences. Last time, I praised the skil fully humorous sequence about fumbling teenagers, God's Country. Now, with ...