Radio drama tells stories in auditory freedom

Radio plays from Sweden and Finland

AV MARIA LINDH-GARREAU

Today, there is very little independent reflection on the phenomenon of radio, says French radio producer René Farabet, writing in praise of the art of sound. There is also a shortage of scholarly writing on radio drama and in the long term, there is a risk that critics' and policy makers' perceptions about radio drama will become (or continue to be) sadly lacking. This might allow reforms and demands for cost-cutting to suddenly undermine radio drama operations in a drastic way, something that has in fact happened to the Swedish-language radio drama department at YLE (the Finnish Broadcasting Company) in recent years. In this instance, radio drama has been equated with any other form of radio, rather than being recognized as the nationwide theatre that it in fact is.

In Sweden, the situation is different. There is classic drama, dramatizations of novels, rare dramatists, new dramatists and above all, dramatists who write specifically for radio as a medium. The more avant-garde auditory arts have also been given a stage of their own, Vita nätter (White nights), every year in May, when the limits of expression in the medium of radio are tested in different ways.

In a culture where the visual is an end in itself, radio as a medium risks being dismissed as incomplete, as the 'blind' medium. It is burdened by the 'dread of seeing nothing', to paraphrase the French psycho-analyst, linguist and philosopher Luce Irigaray, who has dealt with the significance of the visual for status differences between men and women. But I would like to exchange the word 'dread' for 'freedom'. To use theatrical expression in a medium where there is 'nothing to see' also creates great potential for combining incompatible settings, for changing settings and realities in a split second and for illogical sequences of events.

Freedom and fleetingness are, to my mind, two features that are specific to the genre of radio drama. After all, they are also specific to the very nature of sound. French scientist Alfred A. Tomatis speaks of sound as disruption in an initial molecular motion; every silence/acoustic environment is thus a molecular field which is already in motion and sounds are inconstant, inconsistent motions which impact on this basic motion; multi-faceted and difficult to pin down.

Radio dramatist, a specialist trade

Those radio plays which draw on the potential for freedom and fleetingness in text and/or direction are usually the most memorable. These are the productions which bring out the unique character of radio, the features which separate radio drama from drama on stage and, consequently, are its foremost artistic raison d'être.

The greatest classic of radio drama to claim the full potential of sound is, of course, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas from 1953 (it is easy to forget that radio drama is a relatively new art form). Here the drowned speak with the sleeping, the everyday lines of the villagers blend in with the narrator's voice. The many voices link up with each other. There is no need for explanation or clear transitions; the living and the dead coexist without constraint in the world of sound.

The successors of Dylan Thomas are artists who have the courage for free auditory story-telling. However, dramatists who write good radio drama may have difficulties in entering the stage. In Finland, for instance, Petri Salin has turned out to be specifically a   radio dramatist, while in Sweden, Alexander Ahndoril, exciting dramatist that he is, has not quite managed to cross the threshold onto the stage either.

Ahndoril has no difficulty in crossing numerous other borders, however: for instance in Demonverket (The Work of Demons), where the spirit world is engaged in a duel for the last few hours of the life of Johan, a family man who is dying from cancer. Time frames shift, the future is shown as an illusion and spirits enter the family home which is realistically rendered. The production was the Swedish entry in the 1999 Prix Italia competition, but to my ears, the director's approach did not give enough space for the actors to work in. The ear and hearing are directly linked with our nervous system and emotions, so every breath takes on meaning and any overacting rings very false -- in that sense, radio drama is actually more revealing than the stage.

Petri Salin together with radio drama director Solveig Mattsson won the Nordic Radio Drama Prize in 2000 for Inbjudan till resa (L'invitation au voyage). It is a kind of auditory version of The Matrix, a science-fiction inspired adventure with its own unique world of sounds, completely devoid of electronic cliché. It is a description of a future where the wealthy live in a walled city while the poor outside the walls dream of finding a way in, a criminal way if need be, resorting to black-market dealing in stolen bio-cybernetic body parts. The production is fascinating, with fast-paced action and carefully thought-out detail such as echoing voices to express drug trips and a cyborg programmed with the Oxford Random Quotes.

Body and soul - side by side

Och om bettlare och vägmän (Of pilgrims and of beggars) by Susanne Ringell was first broadcast by Swedish Radio Drama in Finland in December 2003. It is a play loosely centred around the poem The Beggar from Luossa by Dan Andersson. Ringell places her characters in a swimming-bath in Helsinki. She writes about the everyday lives of the bathers and their longing. She combines anti-dandruff shampoo and daydreams, interweaves inner monologues with dialogue about underwear and swimming in holes in the ice. Here we find body and soul next to each other, naked and natural.

The recording, directed by Solveig Mattsson, was made in an actual swimming-bath. As a setting it has both poetic character and tangible features, with steam hissing off the sauna stove, people breathing in the steam-room and the general acoustics of a swimming-bath. This is an auditory milieu which brings the physical presence of the story up close to the listener, via his/her hearing.

Among the more unusual works created specifically for the medium of radio we also find Mamma (Mother), produced by Swedish Radio in 2001, poet Jörgen Gassilewski's debut as a dramatist. Swedish composer Johan Petri directed the play and created a soundscape for it; the reality of the play floats in time and space and has a raw intimacy which draws the listener right into a sphere of powerful emotions.

Here we have a son at his mother's deathbed. The voices fumble and grope among entrances and exits in life and body. They haltingly deal with missing someone and not missing them, they stumble on the borders of the other person's sexuality and gender. The soundscape breaks across this as a sort of creaking, knocking fiddle against a harpsichord. It conveys the anger, sorrow and confusion in the relationship and the present situation by constructing a field of tension through sound.

Freedom and fleetingness. But paradoxically, radio drama is the only form of theatre that can preserve and archive its productions intact, in contrast to the stage, whose productions are dismantled after the final performance.

Maria Lindh Garreau is a theater critic in Hufvudstadsbladet and Dagens Nyheter