‘Oddly enough,’ declared the actor John Hurt on the Today programme last Friday, ‘radio is closely linked with film.’ This grabbed my attention over tea and porridge. Radio like film? It’s not at first an obvious comparison. Radio deals in images, but surely only those we create in our minds. Hurt went on to explain: ‘Film deals with visual images. Radio deals with linguistic images.’
He was talking to Justin Webb about the plays Tom Stoppard wrote for radio when he set out to establish himself as a dramatist in the early 1960s. Four of them are now available as a five-CD set from the British Library as part of the celebrations for Stoppard’s 75th birthday. Hurt took the lead in one of them, Albert’s Bridge, a surreal reflection on life from the top of the Forth Rail Bridge. Albert (played by Hurt) studied philosophy at university but prefers to work as a painter, spending the day with his thoughts while turning the bridge silver.
It’s unforgettable. I heard a rebroadcast a few years ago, and it’s still as fresh in my mind. There’s virtually no plot; it’s all about Albert’s thoughts as he clambers up and over the cantilevered iron skeleton, paintbrush in hand, creating images that stay riveted on the mind. It’s not where he is — suspended on the bridge — that’s crucial. What makes the play work so well is that we get inside Albert’s mind and start taking on his thoughts as if they are our own, because of the brilliant way Stoppard knits words together, like poetry but told as a story, in the old aural tradition.
Suddenly, what Hurt said about radio began to make sense. It is like film.
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