... Somebody has got it right BY MOIRA PETTY When the mannerisms and stylised gags of situation comedy are fused with sharp characterisation and a density of emotion, the result can be compelling entertainment. Liz Wainwright's superb Somebody (R4, Saturday, Jury 25) was not flagged as sitcom but the casting of Lynda Bellingham in the lead female role and the script's frothy humour led it in that ...

... Comedy of the highest calibre Marcy Kahan has previously written six radio plays and if they were the calibre of the latest, it is my misfortune to have missed them. Everybody Comes to Schicklgruber's (R4, Monday, July 8) was an exquisite comedy of Jewish manners and thwarted ambition. Kahan is the thinking woman's Ruby Wax several of the play's set-pieces made me laugh until I ached. ...

... 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 ...

... Going on a surreal holiday BY MOIRA PETTY John Hegley is the man of the moment in radio drama--his jaunty jingles are everywhere. Fresh from his zany children's play last month, September saw his first comedy series, The Adventures of John and Tony (R4, from Tuesday, September 7). Hegley played John, with Simon Munnery (alias Alan Parker, Urban Warrior), in his first acting role as the bossy ...

... Glitzy characters, drab script The Women In His Life (R2. from Tuesday. October 22) were plentiful: jostling by his sick bed, sulking in New York, Paris, London or Berlin, popping up with interesting surprises (Max, I am your real mother, whispered an ancient nun), hurling themselves xo tneir aeains rrom me xop ot decorators' ladders. In fact, the fawning females in this eight part radio ...

... Bar room banter mesmerises BY MOIRA PETTY Some of the greatest human dramas are encompassed in the most humdrum of activities. Conor McPherson's mesmeric play The Weir (R3. Sunday, March 8) is about the business of being mortal, the fragility of life. Even as a picture of cholia emerged, so did the heal ing nature of conviviality over a bottle. The more robustly human the craic the earthy, ...

... 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 ...

... Victorian detail is invigorating By MOIRA PETTY Listeners who did not know Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (BBC Pebble Mill for R4, from Wednesday, December 25) may have turned on in anticipation of a chocolate box, bow-windowed haven of delight. wnat tney win nave got, instead, was a picture of Victorian poverty in which Little Nell and her profligate grand father trudged the ...

... Glimpse behind the public facade BY MOIRA PETTY Angus Wilson's acute depiction of the secret lives behind public lives gave Michelene Wandor's dramatisation of Wilson's novel, Hemlock and After. (Watershed Productions for R4, from Sunday, November 15) a haunting, three-dimensional sense. The story of a teacher-tumed-acclaimed writer, Bernard Sands (Derek Jacobi in a made-to-measure ...

... Deep in roles that never date By MOIRA PETTY Timothy West and Rosemary Leach enveloped themselves so completely in their roles in Death of a Salesman (R4, Monday, October 16), Arthur Miller's plangent elegy for a nation changing beyond recognition, that familiarities of vocal intonation were pletely lost. They became Willy Loman, the elderly, crumbling salesmen comforted no longer even by ...

... West Coast twangs produce the unlikeliest Romans of all By Moira Petty But soft, who goes there? With their American West Coast twangs and Thunderbird puppet inflections, it could only have been Hollywood's finest at play in Julius Caesar (BBC co-production with LA Theatre Works for R3, Sunday, February 26). The cast list was a roll call of voices you had heard on numerous TV movies oddly ...

... By MORIA PETTY THE ACTING profession is notably adept at paying tribute to its own. At countless memorial services and awards ceremonies, the cult of the ego is hijacked in the cause of an anthem to the great and the good. So it was with both anticipation and apprehension that I tuned into The Tragedy of King Lear (R3 co-production with Renaissance Theatre Co.; Sunday, April 10), in which a ...