... Foetal attraction had me rapt BY MOIRA PETTY Describing this radio production of Sylvia Plath's poem Three Women (BBC Manchester for R3. Saturday, January 8) as a drama raised the wrong kinds of expectations. I was relieved that it had not become an anachronistic hymn to the epidural but tained the spiritual intensity of Plath's poem to childbearing, each woman telling her story in lyrical ...

... Bourgeois angst simmers away By MOIRA PETTY Kingsley Amis was fond of opining that a writer needed to shut himself off from family life if he was to get on. Virginia Woolf concluded that the female writer needed a room of her own. Her Mrs Dalloway was irked by the domestic experience even while she embraced it. But, as highlighted in Eileen Atkins' sensitive dramatisation of To the ...

... Elegant shifts of perspective By Moira Petty One of the most difficult effects to achieve in radio drama, I have decided, after hearing Gordon House's ravishing production of Amy's View (R3, Sunday, January 23), must be that of time moving on. Without the visual nudges - greying hair, changing fashions, what is there to indicate temporal movement? David Hare's four-act play was set between ...

... A story to haunt you BY MOIRA PETTY From the heart of her own horror, a 12-year-old victim of the Sierra Leone war spoke with stoicism, humour and imagination. Child of the Border -- Africa, Sia Mia's Story, was the first in a series, CMM of Our Time (R4, from Monday, June 5) about children from different cultures. The project is the brainchild of leading dramatist Lee Hall and head of BBC ...

... Trap of deadly dignity BY MOIRA PETTY Commemorating the dead can be a portentous business, as Michael found out in Soft Stones (BBC Manchester for R4, Tuesday, September 12). He wanted some kind of a memorial to mark the life of his boyhood friend, dead at 35, and was planning to write a poem. While he considered this, he joined a guided tour of Leeds and noticed how the solemn dignity of ...

... They turned on, tuned in and dropped out BY MOIRA PETTY What happens to old hippies? Some grow fat, bald and become the backbone of the local council planning department, according to Peter Roberts. In Raising the Sage (R4, Friday, August 4), his hilarious account of the search for one of the former gurus of sixties cool, erstwhile trendies were dis interred by Californian academics ...

... American epic is full of beauty BY MOIRA PETTY The towering themes of East of Eden (R4, from Sunday, February 27) made for one of the most satisfying Classic Serial adaptions. Elia Kazan's film starring James Dean is a classic but this radio dramatisation by Shaun McKenna, unfettered by Dean's distracting sultriness, got to the heart of John Steinbeck's great novel of sibling rivalry. This ...

... Reflective rock solid drama By Moira Petty Anything which jolts the critics out of their preconceptions is good. The Bellringer and the Bi-Valve (BBC Birmingham for R4, Thursday, January 20) caused me to abandon knee-jerk classifications and analyses. The first of three plays, jointly entitled The Trinity, about the past, present and future, Sarah Woods' entwining of drama and documentary ...

... Strange but seductive fare BY MOIRA PETTY There is nothing like a little bewilderment to make Saturday night go with a swing. Mark Ravenhili's Feed Me (R3, Saturday, November 18) resembled a party where the Martinis are a little too stiff; characters blur and you have trouble following conversations but the sensation is seductively moreish. The play, launching The Wire, a bold and ...

... A touching story of filial duty BY MOIRA PETTY Michael Mears is the Aiec Guinness of afternoon drama. Like Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Mears took every role in Stow Train to Woking (R4, Wednesday, July 5), like him, his touch was light with no shrill caricature. Mears was not merely the entire cast of this touching comedy about filial duty and how the parent/child relationship comes, ...

... Mystery is a weak tribute BY MORIA PEETY Anniversaries of eminent births, deaths and probably barmitzvahs, give the semblance of themed programming in radio drama. Recently we have had Harold Pinter's 70th, and no doubt the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death will launch a flotilla of events but. first, comes the 50th anniversary of the death of fellow Irishman GB Shaw. Quite what GBS would have ...

... Concentrated emotion By Moira Petty When Jane Davis, mother of l9-year-old Shannon, one of the victims of the Pan Am flight which exploded over Lockerbie on December 21, 1989, visited the site, she saw passport photos of the 270 dead and realised the extent of the pain. But the strength of producer Dave Batchelor's Postcards from Shannon (BBC Scotland for R4, Friday, March 10) was in ...