... By MOIRA PETTY DATELINE: Somewhere in East Anglia. Sometime in the Middle Ages. Sexual ing is alive and well and every politically incor rect disease known to the modem workplace is rampant in Gabrielle and the Gargoyles (BBC North for R4; Monday, April 25) by Barbara Machin. Gabrielle is the Barbara Hepworth of her day, inheriting her genius at stone carving from her father. A chip off ...

... Volcanic ambitions BY MORIA PETTY In bed for two years with ME (an illness not a vice), theatre writer Peter Wolf tuned into Radio 4's drama output and was finally inspired to pen his own radio play. Volcano (R4, Thursday, July 25) is about a woman's journey, both literal and metaDhoric. to an eruptive mountain in New Zealand and to a new sense of independence and achievement. Wolf was ...

... Two is admirable company BY MOIRA PETTY Don Haworth's comedy on the writing of the ten commandments was the kind which has them rolling in the aisles, or would if it were staged at a church or repertory theatre. i we i wo (K4, i-naay, ucio- ber 22), suitably adapted and lengthened, would make admirable fare for a regional theatre company, while few congregations would argue with the twinkly, ...

... Cartland romance with a Tarantino touch BY MOIRA PETTY Wally K Daly is best known for his comedy scripts but I think he removed his tongue from his cheek before he sat down to adapt Barbara Cartland's Enchanting EvH (BBC Pebble Mill for R4, Monday, February 13) for He clearly thought it best to go with the flow, a breathy yet pedestrian narrative involving a hero, (Timothy Bentinck) who ...

... Joyful alliance of film and radio BY MOIRA PETTY Radio 4 devours drama, so it is natural that the net should be cast in all directions in search of source material. The Cinema 100 season, marking the cententary of the birth of film, will, over the next few months, take 28 landmark films and turn them into radio plays. The idea is joyful, to me at least, marrying two vastly different forms ...

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... Irish play reveals darker layer BY MOIRA PETTY Brian Friel, the acclaimed star of the contemporary Irish stage, has turned a classic Russian play into what seems like the epitome of Irishness. And yet his version of Turgenev's A Month In the Country (Armada Productions for R4. Monday, January 6), boasting an idyllically fine-tuned Irish cast, retained a strong sense of its Russian setting. ...

... Laugh with the lawyers BY MOIRAPETTY When you can be equally entranced by a poetic yet abstract drama of the traumas of a single mother and a strictly non-PC comedy about lawyers, then radio really is doing its job. Chambers (R4, from Tuesday, March 9) is the sitcom to win over listeners who think they hate sitcom, playing all the strengths of the genre strong context, absurdity of ...

... Evocation of our sombre past The battlefields of the First World War were soberly evoked in Peter Wolf's Strange Meeting (R4, Wednesday, November 11). It was an imaginary re-creation of poet Wilfred Owen's last day in the war zone of the Belgian border, dying on the eve of the Armistice. The inspiration for the play was his poem Strange Meeting, which took his pity for the casualties of war ...

... Havisham's case history BY MOIRA PETTY There are honourable literary precedents for plucking a character from a work of fiction and following them backwards or forwards in time. The surprise is that Ronald Frame, with his gaga saga, Havtsham (R3, Sunday, August 16) is the first into the cobwebbed psyche of the jilted Miss Havisham. Frame's Miss H was very dif ferent from the salsa-dancing ...

... Opening up all the old wounds BY MOIRA PETTY Television's VE Day coverage caught the national mood of unconfined joy, even if it was tempered with snatches of solemn remembrance. It was left to radio, as ever, to probe beneath the flag-waving surface with a series of special sions wnicn closed tne gap between 1945 and 1995 but opened up the scars. Best of the dramas was Nick Stafford's The ...

... Dazzled by a great Invention Charlotte Jones' characters mix feminism with biology in the hunt for Mr Right. In Future Perfect (R4, Monday, April 19), Helen has mislaid her Mr Right, which might smack of carelessness. Helen (sympathetically played by Lesley Vickerage) told her story from a point after the disappearance and before a new reality had descended a limbo land where her job as a ...