Radio plays! Huzzah!
I love radio plays. My particular favourites are the Doctor Who plays by Big Finish[i] but the great joy of radio is freedom. Spaceships, talking donkey’s, amoeba who fall in love; you can write any sound that provokes the listener’s imagination. Rehearsal is light, you record it once, and once published it is available at the audience’s convenience. The perfect solution of an imprisoned stay-at-home parent looking to get work on its feet. Read on to hear a whole new play and learn what we’re doing next.
Little Wonder Productions
At the moment Little Wonder is the marvellously talented Chris Taylor and I. We’ve pulled together the equipment, downloaded the software, had a bunch of try outs – and today’s post is our first experiment at going all the way from script to published radio play. So here it is: press the play button below to stream and listen to our performance of “A Marriage has been Arranged”, with me in the role of Harry and Eldonza DuBois as Lady Aline. PS. Our golden rule is nothing over 20 minutes, so don’t panic, this won’t take longer than your ride to work. Tradition dictates doing the ironing or washing the dishes. Gosh, I’ve been a house husband too long!
Press play here:
So who’s this Alfred Sutro geezer?
Alfred Sutro (1863-1933) was an English author, dramatist and translator who wrote society dramas and satirical comedies for London’s West End in the early twentieth century. He didn’t achieve much critical success; his commercial victory and eventual fame mostly due to determination and productivity[ii]. His work went out of fashion around the time Noel Coward into fashion, and he retired from playwrighting disappointed. So why did we pick him for our first work?
A Marriage has been Arranged: The Seductive Quality of Wounded Characters
A Marriage has been Arranged looks a kind of “Taming of the Shew Lite” romantic comedy. Harry is a boor, but when Aline discovers he has sentimental feelings for the poor her heart melts and she agrees to marry him. Yawn.
But Sutro is underrated. There is a much more interesting journey at the fundament of this play. Both Harry and Aline are wounded in love. But the heart of their injury seems not so much the loss of the individual but the revelation that the world doesn’t make sense, is a hypocritical and idiotic mess, and that nobody else wants to admit it.
Harry is genuinely befuddled that his “bad woman” did not appreciate the transactional superiority of coming back with him after he shot the man with whom she had eloped. He is wounded by his turncoat friends and disappointed by the stream of women attempting to force a marriage. His blunt proposal is nothing less than a cry for help.
Aline, in her turn, is just as isolated and injured. She had seen her lover betray her for money, and then been expected to tour the seasons like a prize who knows she is esteemed to have no value. And yet, for her, there is no escape, no hope; nobody hears her as she decries the lack of options between trophy wife and spinsterhood.
The magical thing that happens in this play is that they listen to each other. Harry understands her comment about India because he paid attention to her story. Her sardonic remarks demonstrate real engagement with his problem. They listen and they begin to trust. Call me a hopeless romantic if you will, but they may just be at the beginning of a Marriage that could work.
Did our experiment work?
Well, hopefully you just listened to a radio play we recorded, on the internet all modern and everything. Hurray for us!
We have many things to learn. Eldonza DuBois whispers seductively at close range to the microphone while I would stride around projecting during my mother’s funeral[iii]. This creates a sound differential that even Chris and Audacity couldn’t completely correct. Microphone discipline, setup, and actor positioning are things we are learning.
It probably didn’t escape notice that neither Eldonza nor I are professional actors. This is a process. We’ve got professionals for the next set, and that will make a difference. I didn’t use pro’s for the first one because I didn’t want to ask until we had at least one we hadn’t completely screwed up!
The software side of things is complex. Learning to upload, share, and mix work together has been difficult) We need to do more experimenting with different sound sources and listening to our results through different devices. It’s hard to make directorial decisions about sounds when you don’t know how the results will, erm, sound.
I am thrilled with our result. Not because we sound like we just came out of a sound booth at the BBC, but because LOOK! It’s a radio play on the internet! And Chris did just amazing work throwing together music on his iPod and Garage Band. We made a thing!
What’s next: Thursday Morning Theatre
We have a new set of recordings; Chekhov’s “The Boor”, Glaspell’s “Trifles” and Crawford’s “Outside” (notice how I slipped that last one in there), which we’re moving into post-production and will be published on some Thursday morning in the future (because I like Thursdays). We’ll be recording more classics around that, experimenting with sound and making the best quality recordings we can manage.
After that, we have a top-secret project, keep your eyes peeled.
Alongside the top-secret project, I have assembled a crack team of writers who are coming up with new radio shorts for me as we speak. By the time we get to recording their pieces we should have done more than a dozen plays, so either we’ll have got good at the sound or I’ll have fired me and found someone better.
As we get more plays, I’ll expand it so you can download them from iTunes and probably stuff like Spotify and Deezer. I say probably because I have no idea (yet) how these things work. But the joy of the 21st century is that, if you’re really stuck, someone has recorded a YouTube tutorial (how do you think I renovated my flat).
The bottom line is this: I have somehow persuaded a fabulous set of actors and writers to come record plays with me, which we will make free to access here on the website. Please leave comments and feedbacks, subscribe in the box below or on the right if you want to be kept up to date, and keep your eyes open: new plays coming soon![iv]
[i] What, you were expecting something else? Seriously, check out Big Finish, they are awesome (and double plus awesome if you like Doctor Who)
[ii] Two of my favourite qualities in a writer, perhaps second and third after “nice.” “Talent” can go fuck itself.
[iii] One suspects for some that joke was a little close to the bone, but I sold my soul to the dark side a long time ago. And I have been informed that I am really, really loud. Sorry about that, but, honestly, would it be so difficult for the rest of you to a) speak louder b) speak faster and c) learn to talk and listen at the same time, so we could get on with things and stop with all this dawdling!
[iv] Don’t worry, there will also be incredibly dense and academic articles about grammar and the structure of story. I haven’t given up on that yet either!
