The sofa that became a work of art

Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of the Juilliard School, just about to embark on their professional careers in music. It’s a hard life. They’re asked to be perfect, which of course is unattainable. She wanted to encourage them to keep going, to persist in pursuing their art, despite the inevitable phases of discouragement and disappointment. Because, she says, art has the power to build bridges across cultures, religions, political divides. ‘It teaches empathy.’

She was referring particularly to musical art, but what she was saying applies also to radio. The intimacy and immediacy of listening create such a strong connection that it’s impossible not to feel a close identity with the person you are listening to, and to begin to understand something of their lives, what makes them tick, how they think, why they behave as they do. Take this Wednesday’s afternoon play on Radio 4, simply but so effectively produced by Tim Dee.

The Man Who Turned into a Sofa took us right to the heart of what it feels like to be so depressed you’re terrified to leave the house and the only safety is to be found on the sitting-room sofa. Put like that it sounds absurd. A parody of a Radio 4 domestic drama. But this was different. It was less a play and more like a sequence of poems, written and told by the man himself, Andrew Peters, and his partner and teenage daughter, and woven together with music by William Goodchild that was perfectly attuned to the piece. Each of them gave us their point of view on what had happened to their once-happy and sorted family.