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Thursday 4 December 2008

Violent deaths revisited

4.4.68 (BBC Radio 4); A Long Way From Home (BBC Radio 3)

The next evening, Radio Three broadcast a new play by the novelist Caryl Phillips based on the tragic death of the Motown star Marvin Gaye, another black figurehead from the Sixties. Gaye was a preacher’s son whose career as a singer began in the Church but soon gravitated to sex and drugs and R&B. A Long Way from Home opened with a few bars from ‘I heard it through the grapevine’; such a simple device but so effective. Gaye’s haunting, wailing voice is unmistakable; and that Motown sound of horns and vibes and pulsing bass can be dated so precisely. Phillips’s play was an attempt to understand how this fabulous singer ended up being shot dead by his father. It’s not a pretty story. Marvin himself was a woman-beating, homophobic, drug-addled man; his father was a cruel and bitter cross-dresser who neglected his wife and hated his son for being so successful. But out of this Phillips created a mesmerising drama (directed by Ned Chaillet).

Comparing these two plays was like a masterclass in how to write a radio play. Phillips had to contend with moving our imaginations from London to Ostend (where Gaye was befriended by a Belgian nightclub owner who encouraged him to write ‘Sexual Healing’) to LA, and with a cast of miscellaneous girlfriends and music-business honchos. But never once was I lost or confused. On the surface the dialogue was not very sophisticated — ‘I’m not a performing clown. I don’t dance to anyone’s tune,’ says Marvin to a concert promoter who’s trying to persuade him to leave his hotel room without the drugs he insists on before singing in front of Princess Margaret. His mother, meanwhile, tells him, ‘Your father’s an unhappy man. I guess God made him that way.’

It’s the economy with which Phillips chooses his words that engages the listener, and the pacing, the modulation, the rhythm of the dialogue which hold the attention. But how does he spark the imagination, so that the listener takes an active role in the drama, a witness to what’s going on, not just a passive onlooker? That’s the mystery of radio, the magic, the absolute reason why Marconi’s invention cannot be surpassed.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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