Martin Esslin, a legendary BBC radio drama producer, wrote concerning the definition of drama: “Definitions -and thinking about definitions- are valuable and essential, but they must never be made into absolutes; if they are, they become obstacles to the organic development of new forms, experiment and invention.”
Esslin’s point was that it is useful and productive to define, classify, and sort things, but that pedantry and dogmatism is to be avoided. Such is my policy when trying to answer the question, “What is a radio play?”
A lot of times when I tell people that I make radio plays or audio dramas, their first response is, “Oh! I love audiobooks!” I then need to carefully explain what precisely a radio play or audio drama is, and how it is different from an audiobook.
But the reality is that the line is often blurred. You have your radio plays (or audio dramas) which adapt or dramatize books, but you also have audiobooks which are sometimes a full-cast reading of the text. The key difference is whether what you’re hearing is a drama or a dramatic reading.
Another crucial element of the puzzle is the existence of actors and the existence of an audience. If something has neither actors nor an audience, then it isn’t drama.
A radio play is a work of enacted fiction in pure sound, and requires actors and an audience to be fully realized.
Examples of a radio play include The Green Hornet, Under Milk Wood, and Adventures in Odyssey. Examples of an audio drama include Welcome to Night Vale, The Bright Sessions, and The Dex Legacy.
In my opinion, the difference between the radio play and the audio drama is one of format.
A radio play is by definition on the radio, and has the limitations which come from being on the radio. It must be fifteen, thirty, or forty-five minutes long, and broken up into installments if necessary. It must be rated hard PG, at the most.
An audio drama, which is usually on the internet, can be anywhere from five minutes in length to five hours. It can be released daily, weekly, or monthly, and can strive for an R-rating if it wants.
But I generally use the terms “radio play” and “audio drama” interchangeably, and prefer to use the term “radio play.” It’s less of a mouthful and less likely to be confused with the term “audiobook.” I count the two as one and the same because despite their differences in format, they share a shape and a form. What makes a good radio play is usually also what makes a good audio drama.
Audiobooks, however, are a different beast. An audiobook is not a recording of a drama, but a recording of a dramatic reading. The audiobook takes the form of a narrator, voice-over artist, or perhaps a collection of voice-actors, reading the text of a printed book. They are not “acting it out.” A lot of times, an audiobook is barely acted at all. The point of an audiobook is the clarity of the actual text, not the force and memorability of the performance. The opposite is true with radio drama.
I define the radio play (or audio drama) as “a work of enacted fiction in pure sound.” I borrow the term “enacted fiction” from Martin Esslin’s book An Anatomy of Drama. Esslin believed that the presence of actors (whether those actors are people or puppets) was a critical element in any drama. Drama, meanwhile, just means “action,” and you can’t have action without actors.
What does that mean for the radio play? It means that the true radio play is distinct from the audiobook in that it consists of actors engaged in action, with action consisting of language. The radio play is thus different from the novel because it is defined by drama (or action), but is different from the stage-play or the film because it is not defined by spectacle.
In a stage-play, you can witness the beauty of an actress live and in-person. In a film, you can marvel at the majesty of a landscape or the carnage of a battle, and sometimes such things are the only things worth mentioning about a particular film. These are all examples of spectacle.
But in a radio play, there is no visual, spectacular element, none which is objective, anyway. The stage is your mind, and everything you hear through your smartphone speakers or radio set only really exists in your own imagination.
Thus, the radio play is simply sound drama. It exists only in time, like music, but it has a plot and characters, like novels and plays. I would go so far as to call a particularly magnificent radio play a literary symphony. Some people have suggested the term “sonic novel.” Again, I personally prefer the term “radio play.”
A radio play, to be fully complete, needs two things: Actors and an audience. Without actors, there is no radio play to speak of, and I actually believe that the presence of actors is more important than the presence of a script. That is true whether the actors are live, recorded, or are synthesized via AI.
So, we have established that a radio play is a sound drama, and that drama requires actors, even more than it requires a script. But there is one more element which cannot be neglected: A radio play needs an audience.
It can be an audience of one. It can be an audience of one hundred. Because radio is not a crowd medium (unlike the stage or the film), it speaks intimately, privately, to one person at a time, much like a novel does. But there must be some kind of audience, whether that audience is your child or the listenership of NPR.
So, to summarize, the radio play is subtly distinct from the audio drama, and profoundly different from the audiobook, the constant blurring of boundaries aside. The difference lies in a focus on a strong performance (the radio play) versus a focus on the clarity of the text (the audiobook).
My definition of the radio play (“a work of enacted fiction in pure sound”) draws from the writings of Martin Esslin, with the caveat that both I and Esslin would prefer to focus on producing rather than theorizing. Both are necessary, but the second must serve the first. The radio play combines the principle form of sound with the principle shape of drama. This latter element (drama) requires both actors and an audience to be relevant, just as the former element (sound) is required for it to exist at all.
This definition of the radio play as “sound drama” is, I think, a simple and helpful one. My purpose for engaging in any kind of discussion about definitions at all is to dispel confusion and establish ground rules for the rest of the book. I kept it all quite short for a reason. In the words of Ecclesiastes: “The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?”
Levi Sweeney is an indie radio producer from Seattle, Washington, whose debut radio drama Son of Yi, Son of Pangu is now available on Spotify.