... Moving drama with pedigree BY MOIRA PETTY Those time-honoured doggy commands sit, wait and down may not be the obvious catch words of the self-help, psychobabble generation. Yet the discipline of dog training became an allegory for getting on with life in Dogged Persistence (R4, Friday, August 25). This entertaining comedy was written by Martyn Wade for its two redoubtable leading ladies. ...

... Pinter's mortal choice By MORIA PETTY The 70th birthday celebration production of Moonlight (R3, Sunday, October 8) was chosen by Harold Pinter as the work he would most like to hear on radio and act in. Fittingly, he selected a piece which dealt with the imminence of death. First seen at the Almeida in 1993, it explored the ultimate taboo. The issue of mortality was refracted through the ...

... Fishing drama is a prize catch BY MOIRA PETTY The Wire, Radio 3's series of new plays by controversial writers, came up trumps with Richard Bean's Unsinkable (R3, Saturday, December 2), a gritty drama of the hard lives of Hull trawlermen and their families in the sixties. It made the cheesy efforts of Hollywood's fishermen epic, The Perfect Storm, look tawdry by comparison. Unsinkable may ...

... Anti-feminist message? BY MOIRA PETTY Lawyers Chartie and Stephanie took the adversarial tradition to enjoyable new depths in the courtroom drama The System of Justice (R4, Friday, May 19). Stephanie's client Ray was a bigtime villain, but she scared the life out of me when she unleashed her vitriolic tongue on him. Then she turned her atten tion to her former flame Charlie, who had made a ...

... Surreal comedy worth opening the door for By MOIRA PETTY Playwright Martin Smith borrowed nemesis, hubris and a Crook chorus from the Ancient tragedians and transplanted them to a factory's packaging department in his exuberant comedy Jeff's Kingdom (R4. Wednesday. August 2). The humour became blacker, richer and more frenzied as those tools of the gods swung into action to bring retribution ...

... Moving child's eye view BY MOIRA PETTY Sometimes the Afternoon Play offers a piece, like Lulu (R4, Thursday, September 7), which is so funny, warm and original that it begs to be heard by audiences who aren't looking for an accompaniment to ironing or motoring at 2.15pm. Perhaps there is a case for a night-time repeat of daytime drama, like that of John Peel's Home Truths. What made Lulu ...

... No barriers to vintage drama BY MOIRA PETTY What is great about radio dramatisations of period pieces is that costumes and sets do not get in the way. You cannot go into a trance over an interesting curtain treatment--you have to concentrate on the voices and soon find yourself swept up in the subtext. Not that much of the motivation in Honore Balzac's Cousin Bette, the Poor Relation ...

... This femme was fatally good By Moira Petty There was sex and something approaching shopping (the eponymous queen petulantly trying on 30 dresses from her wardrobe) in a stunning reworking of Jean Racine's Phedre (Festival Radio for R3. Sunday, June 11). Racine's original was set in the Ancient World and adapted from that beguiling storehouse of sexual intrigue and political machination, Greek ...

... Artful dissection of friendship By Moira Petty Power struggles are always riveting. Shakespeare's Richard II talked of buckets in a well spilling from one to the other. The friends in Yasmina Reza's Art (Mentorn Radio for R3, Sunday, May 7) experience similar shifts in their relationship as a vigorous ment or, more likely, a crotcnety put down, placed one ahead of the others. A huge success ...

... Comic sociology in cartoon form By Moira Petty He is invisible, a cog in the monolithic Chester-Perry Organisation, gyrating comically like a hamster on its wheel. Returning for another series based on the Frank Dickens cartoon strip, Bristow (R4, from Friday, July 7), was, as ever, a one-man crusade against the conspiratorial powers that be. Like his blood brothers, Reginald Perrin and Diary ...

... Drama to top the year's best BY MOIRA PETTY There have been few dramas this year as engaging as James Friel's dramatisation of Iris Murdoch's dark novel of human frailties, A Falrty Honourable Defeat (Catherine Bailey productions for R3, Sunday, December 10). me source maienai was sat isfying of course Murdoch's tale of the malign influence of Julius King, an Eastern European intel lectual ...

... Treads a likeable path BY MOIRA PETTY I had not thought of Rosalind as a control freak before this new As You Like It (R3, Sunday, April 23). It may have appeared so only to my ears, for the direction by Kate Rowland was light and unforced, allowing the magic of this forest of Arden setting to creep over the characters, much assisted by Harvey Brough's music. In a way Helena Bonham Carter ...