Shakespeare works very well on radio.
Why? Because the plays of William Shakespeare were written with minimal consideration of props, scenery, or music. For the most part, Shakespeare’s principle tool was words, language, speech. This is the same challenge faced by the radio dramatist.
In radio, the spoken word, speech, is the primary element, and reigns supreme. Radio is a writer’s medium because speech is supreme. With speech, the radio dramatist is able to signal to the listener that the story takes place in a neanderthal’s cave, on the surface of Mars, or in Cardiff. Speech is also used to indicate whether a character is a hero or a villain, and speech is used by them to do what they want. Remember that in drama, language is action. This is doubly so in sound drama.
Speech is the fundamental element in radio drama, and is used to establish setting and express character.
All potency which a radio drama might have comes from the spoken word. You thrill to the cackle of the Shadow, you grapple with the symbols and ideas of The Dark Tower, and you sit in wonder as Dr. Cornelius explains the real history of Narnia in Prince Caspian.
This might seem puzzling to people more familiar with the maxim of film and television which argues, “Show, don’t tell!” But in radio, you show when you tell. You do exactly that when engaged in deep, private conversation with an intimate friend.
It is therefore not strange at all when the 1989 Adventures in Odyssey episode “Heatwave”, written by Paul McCusker, opens with Jack explaining where he lives, what time of year it is, who he is, and what he was doing with his friend Oscar before they first encountered the mysterious kid with the initials “D.D.”
An opening narration of this kind would be totally unacceptable in a film or a TV show. If “Heatwave” were a film, there would be a long, establishing shot of Jack’s hometown, perhaps some visual indicators of the height of summer, and then the introduction of Jack and Oscar as two bored, dorky, but harmless teenagers with nothing better to do other than stalk D.D.
But in radio, this is a classic example of what speech is for.
In the absence of an objective visual element, a radio dramatist must use speech alone to a degree which is more critical than even in a stage-play. Unlike film or TV, where you could conceivably dispense with the spoken word altogether, radio’s best, primary means of conveying specific information about plot, setting, and character is speech. Music, sound effects, and silence bolster such speech.
Speech is used in radio to establish the physical facts of the story, with sound effects playing a supporting role.
The 1992 BBC adaptation of The Gloria Scott from Vincent McInerney opens with the sound of church bells, followed by dialogue between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes where the listener is told that it is winter. The implication is that Watson and Holmes are quietly observing Christmas together while in a less-than-festive mood. Perhaps Watson is sullen following the passing of a loved one, and Holmes is seeking to distract him when the Great Detective begins narrating the story of his first case.
In this instance, dialogue and sound effects are used together to establish setting and mood, with both the physical facts and emotional tone of the story communicated through this combination of speech buttressed by sound effects.
Another way of accomplishing the task of exposition and scene-setting is through simple narration. In the past, the use of narration has been the subject of intense debate in radio drama circles, with overuse of the narrator as a theatrical device prompting a backlash where large efforts were made to banish him (or her) completely.
In my opinion, there are two keys to using a narrator successfully.
One, the dramatist must make the narrator’s lines as economical as the rest of the dialogue in the script (one voice-actor informed me that scripts written in the Golden Age of Radio limited each line of dialogue to no more than three lines of text on the page).
Two, the narrator should ideally be one of the characters in the story, such as when Jim Hawkins is both the narrator of Orson Welles’ 1938 adaptation of Treasure Island while also being a character in the story who dialogues with other characters. This tactic was also used in the BBC Journey Into Space serial from the 1950s, where the character of Doc Matthews is also the story’s narrator.
The virtue of using a narrator is that exposition, worldbuilding, and setting of scene and mood are neatly taken care of while working in concert with music and sound effects, thus freeing up dialogue scenes to add to all of these while also focusing on revealing character. Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s 2012 BBC adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo is a case in point of such a correct, artful use of a narrator, and I cannot recommend that production enough.
But the vice of overusing a narrator is plainly evident in one adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I once listened to, produced by Spoken Arts (an American company) in the early 1970s.
This adaptation did a marvelous job showcasing the character of Captain Nemo, but it utterly failed in using Professor Arronax as the story’s narrator. Arronax simply talks far too much in this dramatization, with the radio dramatist responsible apparently transposing large splotches of the original text of the Jules Verne novel into the script and then calling it good.
The result is that Arronax has no character of his own because he as a person becomes meaningless through his omnipresence, and potentially interesting opportunities to explore the characters of Ned and Conseille are neglected because Arronax just will not shut up.
This unfortunately subpar adaptation of 20,000 Leagues violated the first key of narration: Keeping the narrator’s lines as economical as every other line in the script. I now limit the lines of dialogue in my own scripts (including the voice-overs of a narrator) to a maximum of three lines of text each.
(Verbose scripts where long monologues are frequently inserted into the mouths of multiple different characters is a stylistic choice which I found while producing Son of Yi, Son of Pangu to be mostly a mistake in radio drama, with some important exceptions. Pangu, being my freshman effort, was a learning experience in what things most listeners find boring and irritating. Long, expository speeches by individual characters which might go on for half-a-page of script is one such awful thing.)
Speech is critical in radio drama not just for painting scenes, but for painting characters. In radio drama, the words which come out of a character’s mouth reveal his motives, illustrate his personality, and spell out what he is doing.
The Adventures in Odyssey episode “Heatwave” once again is instructive. This episode opens with a correct use of the monologue, establishing the story as a noir detective mystery, complete with jazzy incidental music. But it then fades in to Jack (the narrator) and his friend Oscar sitting quietly on somebody’s front porch saying to each other: “So, what do you wanna do?” “I dunno. What do you wanna do?” “Well, we gotta do something!”
This subtle transition from gritty, hardboiled detective story to light comedy in the vein of a Saturday morning cartoon tells us many things about Jack and Oscar, and the story.
First, Jack is a pretentious and big-headed blowhard who is not making the best use of his time, and Oscar is his hapless toady who is too dimwitted not to copy Jack’s dubious behavioral choices. Second, it establishes this radio play’s whole story, right from the start, as a gently satirical critique of the cynical film noir detective hero who might be brave and adventurous, but who also would probably be better off most of the time if he just minded his own business.
Drama specializes in communicating multiple details at once through a combination of different methods in order to create subtext. The complexity of things not actually being as they appear is a cornerstone of playwrights from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Brecht.
In sound drama, speech can be used to communicate multiple levels of meaning through intonation, speed, volume, pauses, dialect, verbal tics, and diction, and must do this far more than on the stage or in film and TV because only the ear is being engaged. Gestures, facial expressions, camera angles, and the like are not factors in the nonvisual, non-spectacular world of radio drama. It is the voice alone which comes through in a radio play performance.
This means that in a radio play, individual actors have more power and importance in defining the story itself than in any other form of drama. This also means that the divide between writer and audience is significantly lessened, because, by design, the only sense through which a radio play script can be interpreted is the human ear, and the only sense concerned is the sense of hearing.
In radio, there is one cook, the writer, and one waiter, the actor, and one customer, the listener. In, say, a film, there is a team of cooks, a gang of waiters, and a mob of customers. Radio is much more intimate than that.
Once again, radio is a writer’s medium, and in radio drama, there is plenty of room for both the writer of the script and the actors bringing that script to life to both put their own stamp on the whole production. A radio script’s dialogue is where the writer and the actors meet.
To close this discussion on speech, remember, the spoken word is king in radio drama, for the same reason that the still image is king in the comic book. For this reason, some theorists have compared the radio play to the campfire story or even to oral tradition.
A closer analogue might be the simple bedtime story. A parent paints a picture for his young child to lull him to sleep, and his only power is the spoken word alone. He can whisper, act, maybe sing, but he has only his voice and his wits. And the spoken word, the human voice, can tell a lot about the human soul by itself.
There is a German proverb which says, “Choose your wife not with your eye, but with your ear.” Indeed, the spoken word is harder to disbelieve than the written word, and the voice of a character says more when it exists as sound rather than as mere print.
Speech reigns in radio drama because it is an auditory medium where the sense of hearing is focused on and amplified to the maximum. In radio, the spoken word is mechanically, electronically, captured and reproduced, and is then divorced from all visual associations. When broadcast through the disembodied voice of the radio set, the spoken word suddenly has new power and meaning. What it describes is imagined. What it insinuates is seen. What it declares is new.
What does this all mean for the radio dramatist? It simply means that the radio play can make the old sound new, and can make the new sound radical. Radio drama, with its ability to contain a private viewpoint for a private audience, but in the accessible form of a vibrant drama comparable in nature to a story from the stage or the cinema, has the power to charm, cajole, and cause a stir in the minds of all who desire such things to be done to them.
Radio works best on the excitable.
The trusting, impressionable, and very excitable pre-adolescent child, who is always in the mood for a good show, is thus a natural fan of the radio play, barring, of course, an early exposure to TV, which I do not recommend to any parent.
Levi Sweeney is an indie radio producer from Seattle, Washington. His debut, feature-length radio play Son of Yi, Son of Pangu is now available on Spotify.