... McKenzie's shocking monologue By MOIRA PETTY Julia McKenzie is so identified with musical theatre and comedy that the shock of hearing her embroiled in an emotional roller- coaster as a newly deaf woman in Sounds of Silence (BBC Birmingham for R4, Monday, September 28) added to the power of both the writing and the performance. This was a monologue, the loss of hearing told from within the ...

... Roads leading somewhere BY MOIRA PETTY People at the crossroads of their lives are always interesting. Sartre's trilogy The Roads to Freedom, brilliantly dramatised for the Classic Serial (R4, from Sunday. March 3) by Nigel Gearing, proved thoroughly gripping as youngish Parisians in the late thirties play life as a game of consequences. Each episode takes one of the books, beginning with ...

... Sartre's Hell could be the Northern Line BY MOIRA PETTY Listening to Michael Earley's impeccable production of No Way Out (R3. Sunday, March 12) brought back a recent news story. In the play, here living up to its reputation as Jean-Paul Sartre's finest drama, Garcin, one of the trio embalmed in a living hell cinctly describes their dilemma: Hell is other people. Transport Minister ...

... Freedom with a magical touch BY MOIRA PETTY On the radio, those Shakespearian plays in which multiple corpses are forced to die with comic-strip aaarghs can cause levity in the listener. The Tempest, dusted with magic as it is, always requires a production in which belief is suspended and the audience's imagination is trig gered. Sue Wilson's production of The Tempest (BBC Pebble Mill for ...

... A change for the better? By Moira Petty Mankind's feeble grip of the evolutionary ladder, and how easily we regress, is the theme of several plays. We change and develop. That's why we're not up in the trees with the monkeys, says one character in Neil Brand's drama on the demise of silent movies, Talkers (R4, Friday, June 26). Movie boss Jack Warner (Bradley Lavelle), touring America in ...

... A frenzied musical inspiration BY MOIRA PETTY Music, so often the accompaniment or the counterpoint to radio drama, is also one of its great themes. On the surface, at least, the explanation would appear obvious. All the ingredients for illustrating such a piece are more readily avail able than. say. a play seeking to probe the art of painting. And yet, in many cases, a musical theme gives ...

... Pomposity punctured By MOIRA PETTY From the opening scene's first impassioned discussion of a woman's need to be in the home versus her right to be out in the world. Moliere's sprightly comedy The Sisterhood (Les femmes savanls) (R3, Sunday, May 26) hit the most surprising of porary notes. Ranjit Bolt's translation was more than just that. It dripped with juicily topical references which ...

... Boomerang generation By MOIRA PETTY Chris Thompson's series about grown-up children who keep coming home to stay, Boomerang (Bite Back Radio for R4, from Thursday, August 29), has hit on one of those subjects much beloved of chat show producers and features editors. Andy (Wayne Foskett) has returned penniless to the parental abode where he sits around digesting daytime TV and using up all the ...

... Satirical slant on vicar's woes By Moira Petty Irony won out over sentiment in a rumbustious production of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefleld (BBC Birmingham for R4, from Sunday, October 3). There is evidence that Goldsmith intended his story to be seen as more than a moral fable in which the virtuous win out over the unscrupulous. This classic serial adaptation, directed by Sue ...

... By MORIA PETTY That old Fleet Street line about news fit to print- and printed to fit- sprang to mind recently when surveying radio drama. Last year's Radio 4 revamp weeded out a strand of tedious radio play writing, long on agonised introspection, short on anything that might pass for wit. But the pre-packaged drama slots, and a new ethos in radio dramaland, has resulted in an output which ...

... Classless soap shows the way The soap is a maligned art form. At its best, it is a microcosm of the world it portrays, everyday trivia is as important to the drama as the cliffhanger issues which makes them so addictive. A soap cannot be judged accurately on the first episode or two (EastEnders being a good example in the mid-eighties), so I have waited until now to pronounce on the twice ...

... First-class lesson in male hate David Williamson's debunking of political correctness, Dead White Males (BBC World Service, Saturday, August 29) is erudite, ironic and humane--a modem classic. This production, directed by Gordon House and adapted for radio by John Foley, had a sense of robust purpose, of blood being spilt, which hooked you to every scene. The pace was terrific as the debate ...