... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... Hell-tale update BY MOIRA PETTY When TV has themed nights, it is all low-brow culture viewed with the regulatory post-modem irony. How liberating for those working in radio drama that they can, without blushing, take their cue from culture with a capital C. And how dangerous An updated version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an undertaking, especially as 2000 Tales (R4, from Monday, ...

... Social division merits derision By MOIRA PETTY Larita Whittaker is a heroine after my own heart. The catalyst of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue (Catherine Bailey Ltd for R3, Sunday, December 26) preferred to read Marcel Proust than practise her tennis, proclaiming: I don't think the ends will justify the means. I wish I had wriggled out of school sports lessons with such elegance. Coward was ...

... 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 ...