Filling in the blanks

Caldwell’s drama cleverly criss-crosses back and forth through the family’s memory trail, looking for reasons, but has the courage not to provide us with neat answers. There never can be an ending to such a devastating event. Did Amy kill herself? Was she killed? Or did she just run away? (Girl from Mars was crisply directed by Heather Larmour.)

Over on the World Service this Saturday evening and next, the winning plays in the International Radio Playwriting Competition run by the World Service and the British Council are being broadcast for the first time. This year there were 1,200 entries from around the world, many written by those for whom English is a second language. If ever you should feel the need to question the existence of the licence fee, then this competition should convince you that it is worth paying. The entries come from such an amazing diversity of writers, of all ages and backgrounds, with so many stories to tell (or rather show).

At the prize-winning ceremony in London last month, Efo Kodjo Mawugbe told us how he grew up listening to the plays on the World Service. It was through listening that he was in turn inspired to write. It is, he reminded us, a form of cultural exchange: through the radio, people can be brought together by slow degrees, by a gradual wising up to the ways in which we are different and yet essentially the same. The Prison Graduates, his political comedy set in his native Ghana, can be heard next week as the winner in the English as a second language category.

Erin Browne’s Trying, which won the English as a first language category, is set in southern California, but is not about sunny skies, palm-tree-lined beaches and the fantasy life of the idle rich. Browne instead takes us inside the lives of those who, for minimum wages, have to work so hard for that unreality to exist, cleaning rooms, washing up, dredging swimming pools for dead flies. This we discover not by being told in heavy bouts of dialogue but through the gradual unfolding of the relationship between two sisters, Chelsea and Lena, who are struggling to cope with the aftermath of the violent death of their father.

Typical radio play, you might think. Most often bleak. Usually about abusive, dysfunctional families. Never giving us a happy ending. But as Erin Browne says in her introduction to her play, ‘Home can make you bigger than you are.’ Not much that is good happens to Lena and Chelsea; not much happens in the play (directed by Marion Nancarrow, who also organises the competition). And yet a shift occurs; a shift of feeling.