... 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 ...

... Religion everywhere TgADIO REVIEW By MOIRA PETTY There was more than a hint of the pagan in the way Stella Gonet played Irish Catholic Greta in Anne Devlin's stunning play After Easter (BBC Pebble Mill for R3, Sunday, June 30). Her children, fathered by an Englishman, were being brought up as Protestants so she could not even fulfil the destiny of every good Catholic girl to be a good, ...

... Raunchy tales of innocents abroad By Moira Petty Restoration theatre's role as the carry On drama of the 17th century-but with a more caustic inderbelly-was perfectly delin eated in a quite delicious production of Wycherley's The Country wife (BBC Pebble Mill for R3, Sunday, June 4). The production fused a musi- ;al score by Malcolm McKee vhich underlined the capers with a bathos of its own, ...

... Sounds of the saddest of themes BY MOIRA PETTY It is odd how beauty can be crafted out of ugliness, sadness out of laughter. Two plays last weekend, linked by a strongly atmospheric use of music and ambient sound, deliberately mismatched style and content with gut-wrenching effect. There was an oriental serenity to H: A Hiroshima Story (BBC North for R3, Sunday, August 6) which belied its ...

... It's a thin line between lust, love and hate BY MOIRA PETTY I've nursed a passionate indifference to Georgette Heyer since early teens when certain factions were rustling the pages of her Regency romances under their desk lids. You could have lobbed almost anything else my way, from Thomas Hardy to The Story of 0, but never these drippy dramas of costumed courtship. R4 listeners of a ...

... A script and cast to kill for By MOIRA PETTY The Classic Serial rarely gets it wrong; but it gets it most right when it disinters a masterpiece with which most of us are not on intimate terms. Effl Briest (R4, from Sunday, May 24) is acknowledged as the opus major of 19th century German writer Theodor Fontane and this tisation by Hugh Morrison from his own translation captures it in ...

... Rural England with panache We associate Dickens with Christmas, yet the social conditions revealed by his incisive pen provide little cheer. What lifts the spirits is the gallery of characters who spring out of his novels, rogues as well as heroes, with their enduring aDoeal. These were my thoughts as I listened to the lustrous large- scale production of The Pickwick Papers (BBC Birmingham for ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...