A tale of two dramas, both from the city and of our time but very different in execution. Déjà vu is the first bilingual radio play on the BBC, written in French and English, and produced in a new collaborative project between Radio Four and Arté, the internet-only TV and radio station. It goes out on air in the traditional way next Wednesday in the Afternoon Play slot on Radio Four, but the following day it will go ‘live’ on the internet on artéradio.com, where you will be able to listen to it whenever you like, and as often as you like, over the next five years. It’s a totally new kind of listening experience; not embedded in a moment of airtime but deliberately created to float in the atmosphere, available for playback at any time.
Claire and Ahmed have begun a cross-Channel relationship after meeting in a bookshop in Paris. Claire lives in London and works at Canary Wharf; Ahmed is Algerian and lives with his mother in Paris. They meet at weekends, crossing the Channel by Eurostar; a quick and easy journey that gives no warning of the difficulties of comprehension when two such different people try to liaise. Ahmed has scars on his forehead and his arm, which he cannot, or will not, explain. Claire’s French is not good enough to understand what Ahmed is telling her. We are in a post-7 July world and Ahmed as a dark-skinned Muslim bearing a rucksack and a stubbly beard is treated with suspicion whether in Paris or London.
But this is not just a play about two people falling in (and out of) love. ‘We emphasise the richness of sound as a poetic tool,’ the executive director of artéradio.com explained. When his company makes a play, they record for eight days (compared to the BBC’s two days in a studio), taking actors and the sound team out on to the streets as if they were making a film. What’s so extraordinary about Déjà vu, directed by Lu Kemp and Christophe Rault, is that you can tell immediately whether Claire and Ahmed are in Paris or London not by whether they are talking in French or English but by the backdrop of sounds: St Pancras or the Gare du Nord, the Métro or the Underground, the noises beyond the window. Even the pigeons tell us we are in Paris, cooing their way through the love scene. The result is very cinematic, very visual, and yet it’s been created entirely through sound.
The actors, Caroline Catz and Karim Saleh, improvised a lot of the dialogue on location, changing the script (by Alexis Zegerman) as they went along. There’s quite a lot of it in French (plus a bit of Arabic), but the soundscape gives you so many clues as to what’s going on that you don’t need to have fluent French or vice versa (although an English translation of the script will be available on the Radio Four website). In fact it’s probably a richer experience if you can’t understand all the dialogue because your struggle to understand what is being said echoes Claire and Ahmed’s experience. It also forces you to fill the gaps with your own emotions, your own memories of a long-distance relationship or one where there’s not been enough trust.
At a pre-broadcast airing of the play, Caroline Catz told us how much richer the experience of making the play had been for her: ‘With text-based radio, reading from a finished script in front of a microphone, it’s very difficult to make the dialogue sound spontaneous.’ That was the problem with Pornography, broadcast on Radio Three on Sunday. Each of the eight voices telling the story of where they were on 7 July 2005 when the bombs went off in London sounded so stilted. You knew they were reading from a script rather than talking directly to us.
This came to radio as a highly praised theatre production from the Birmingham Rep and the Traverse Theatre. Why, I can’t imagine. The script was just so full of clichés: the lonely old spinster, the embittered academic who tries to seduce a former student, the incestuous brother and sister, a bolshie teenager who’s in love with his teacher, and a working mum. The bomber is tracked as he leaves home before dawn and travels down to London, but has no subtlety of portrayal. At one point on the train he mutters to himself, ‘I’m very much in need of mineral water.’
We were given none of the pathos of that day, the banality of tragedy. The only bit that did work was the simple recitation of the names and short lives of the 52 people who died. But that reality sat very uncomfortably with the ghastliness of what went before.
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