Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed          

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time.

The Venice Conundrum, which aired on Radio 4 on Sunday, knitted together Morris’s most famous travel book with Conundrum, the story of his sex change, completed in the 1970s. I had my doubts about how well these two works would sit together, but the dramatisation was not only beautiful, but also hugely illuminating of Morris’s psyche as a traveller caught between two worlds.

Shortly before arriving in Venice, Morris had flushed the oestrogen pills he had been prescribed down the loo and resolved to try to live as a man. His biggest fear was that the hormones might affect his talents as a writer. We really felt his anxieties, for no sooner did we hear them expressed in Conundrum than the narrative shifted and we were listening to one of his most exquisite passages of writing from Venice. It was not his body so much as his mind that he felt was in jeopardy.

The two texts alternated in such a way as to highlight the similarities Morris discerned between himself and La Serenissima. Venice was ‘the outsider’, ‘founded in misfortune’; ‘a complicated place’, ‘enmeshed in contradictions and exceptions’, a place of ‘brazen individualism’ which Morris declared to be ‘always feminine to me’. Not all of these sentiments are self-referential in the texts, but for the purposes of the drama this did not matter.