... Merely flirting with infidelity By MOIRA PETTY Jane Austen's most successful heroines are flawed, although not fatally, but in a little known text. Lady Susan (R4, from Monday, January 11), dramatised by Lavinia Murray in 15-minute chunks, the central character seems without any saving graces. leasing or rone. Harriet waiter played the merry widow whose habit was to enrapture men and enrage ...

... By MORIA PETTY That old Fleet Street line about news fit to print- and printed to fit- sprang to mind recently when surveying radio drama. Last year's Radio 4 revamp weeded out a strand of tedious radio play writing, long on agonised introspection, short on anything that might pass for wit. But the pre-packaged drama slots, and a new ethos in radio dramaland, has resulted in an output which ...

... Gripping Cotswold caper Peter Tinniswood has become a magical name in radio drama, but wtien expectations are high, so are the stakes. The House Swap, (R4, Saturday, February 6) was a jewel, an assemblage of robust cynicism, delicate insights, and dialogue that was natural but never mundane. In other hands, his tale of the spectral presence of a gnarled old man who brings understanding to a ...

... Fat humour thin on the ground By Moira Petty Pal is funny, OK? Or at least black comedy is often the interface between the psyche of the dieter and their attempts to keep afloat in a thin world. But with Fat Chance (R4. from Thursday. February 11) Jenny McDade missed the chance to say thing both funny and profound about an issue that goes far deeper than the dial on the bath room scales. ...

... March flair creates a disturbing affair By MOIRA PETTY The best kind of monologue is a schizophrenic beast: at once, rooted in the subjective, solitary experience of the speaker, and yet seeming to team with other lives touched upon. Such was Char March's disturbing and vivid depiction of a life in turmoil. People Come Here to Cry (R4, Tuesday, March 2), with music by Art composer Gary Yershon ...

... Laugh with the lawyers BY MOIRAPETTY When you can be equally entranced by a poetic yet abstract drama of the traumas of a single mother and a strictly non-PC comedy about lawyers, then radio really is doing its job. Chambers (R4, from Tuesday, March 9) is the sitcom to win over listeners who think they hate sitcom, playing all the strengths of the genre strong context, absurdity of ...

... The Street of dreams Rising star Fiona Allen is part of a new comedy team and has enjoyed drama success. Now she is taking on a part in her favourite soap opera By BOB EBORALL To gain exposure, an actor or actress cannot go wrong these days with a part in the oldest and most successful soap. Coronation Street - which has certainly got some very strong storylines. So it was no wonder that Fiona ...

... Chilling portrait of the powerful By MOIRA PETTY In the impressive first instalment of Mike Walker's four-parter, J Edgar Hoover- Red Scare (R4, from Friday, March 26), the blind zealotry of the creator of the FBI was frighteningly portrayed. Walker's detailed account began with Hoover's early political beliefs, his secondment to the Justice Department and his obsessive compilation of infor ...

... Hot Property's stolen moments BY MOIRA PETTY The exquisite afternoon play, The Property of Colette Nervi (BBC Belfast for R4, Thursday, April 15) began as a short story and kept its microcosmic view of life which lit up the world around it. Master wordsmith William Trevor dramatised his story of a moral sequence of events in rural Ireland in the sixties. Deftly directed by Roland Jaquarello, ...

... Dazzled by a great Invention Charlotte Jones' characters mix feminism with biology in the hunt for Mr Right. In Future Perfect (R4, Monday, April 19), Helen has mislaid her Mr Right, which might smack of carelessness. Helen (sympathetically played by Lesley Vickerage) told her story from a point after the disappearance and before a new reality had descended a limbo land where her job as a ...

... Loving look at pioneering days BY MOIRA PETTY It is right that contemporary stage plays should be adapted for radio, to which other media owe a debt. The case of Stephen Poliakoff's Talk of the City (R3, Sunday, May 9) is more pressing than its simultaneous ability to entertain and provoke. For the play recreates the early days of light entertainment on BBC radio and the fledgling attempts by ...

... Liberating those Aristocrats BY MOIRA PETTY From ancestral hall to sausage factory was one summing up of the ailing Catholic gentry in Brian Friel's magnificent Aristocrats (Armada Productions for R3, Sunday, May 23). Joe Dowling, now at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, directed trie 19 production at Dublin s Abbey Theatre and brought to this radio production a sense of ...