Kate Chisholm

All in the mind | 2 March 2017

Two superb but very different examples of great radio drama were on offer last weekend, including Anthony Burgess’s Oedipus

At the third UK International Radio Drama Festival held last week in Herne Bay, entitled ‘And Let Us Listen to the Moon’, the entries included an Australian play about Chekhov, the limericks of Edward Lear translated into Serbian, a Czech version of Hamlet in which the palace at Elsinore is transformed into a sporting arena, and a play from Palestine in Arabic about three female political activists. Fifty dramas from 17 countries and in 15 different languages were broadcast at various venues across the Kentish town. Not quite Cannes in May — tea and scones stood in for champagne and caviar — but the festival’s success goes to show that in this fast-moving, visual world there’s still an appetite for a different kind of entertainment, with no images, no distractions, no ad breaks or pauses for snacking.

Thom Luz from Switzerland, one of the award-winners at Herne Bay for his ‘audio piece’, which uses music and words to create an experience rather than a narrative, says that drama on air allows us to go on ‘journeys of the mind’ like no other medium. It’s a form of escapism into other realms, other thought-worlds, that’s far more adventurous than anything that visuals can achieve because of its essential interiority. It’s all in the mind. What we see depends on us.

Over the weekend it was possible to hear two superb but very different examples of the genre. On Sunday night Radio 3 splashed out on the cast for its new production of Anthony Burgess’s version of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, with Christopher Eccleston as a Mancunian-sounding Oedipus (Burgess was brought up in that city), Don Warrington as Creon, Adjoa Andoh as Queen Jocasta and Fiona Shaw as the blind soothsayer Tiresias, relishing every word as she spelt out Oedipus’s fate.

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