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Sunday 7 September 2008

Between the lines

The Afternoon Play: Address Unknown (BBC Radio 4)

Two men, a single piece of music and a script that’s barely 40 minutes long. And yet when it was over I felt quite stunned; shaken and unnerved by a totally unexpected dramatic twist. I’d been so absorbed, thinking in my own clever way that I knew what was going to happen, that I understood what I was meant to think about the characters and what they were up to. But then, suddenly, all those expectations were blown apart. Address Unknown, adapted by Tim Dee from the book by Kressmann Taylor, was one of the most effective afternoon plays I’ve heard in a long time. If you missed it, I hope you’ll be inspired to Listen Again (it’ll be available on Radio Four, Afternoon Play, until next Thursday), as an extraordinary example of the power of radio to take over your mind and play with it. You may find the first ten minutes a little contrived, almost too knowing, too predictable, but it’s worth persisting. In the last few minutes, those voices, underpinned by the subtlest use of music, worm their way into your mind, until you suddenly realise, with sickening dread, what the characters are really thinking, what they are really trying to do.

Taylor’s book, we were told by the writer Anne Karpf in a short introduction before the play, was actually a novel that was first published in America in 1938. Despite the fact that it was only 54 pages long, it had an enormous impact, shocking readers with its graphic fictional evocation of how the rise of Nazism in Germany was transforming and corrupting people, even those who had no reason for despair, or hatred. With the onset of war, though, it was forgotten and it fell out of print until its rediscovery and republication in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Once again it became a bestseller, and not just in America but throughout the world, its dramatic power made more telling by the realisation that it was written before the events of the second world war and not with hindsight. Because of this it gained an extra authority; as if it was not just talking about the particular circumstances of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Taylor, after all, was not writing from within the maelstrom either of Germany itself, or of the years of war. (Taylor, by the way, adopted a pseudonym to protect her identity as a woman; her real name was Kathrine Kressmann, the Taylor came from her first husband.) What she lets unfold is the insidious unmasking of two individuals who at the beginning appear just like anyone else, full of affection and goodwill for each other.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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