The Difference
So what makes a radio play different from one for theatre or television? What follows here are a few quick pointers to help you in the right direction. These points are explored further by Craig Warner, a successful radio drama writer.
Everyone knows the cliché about how radio "stretches the imagination." This suggests radio is hard work for the listener. You can't doze off in front of a radio play and expect to pick up the story again when you wake up. Therefore, good radio drama is not easy to write. To create the world of the play in the mind of the listener, you, the writer, have to think as an impresario, sometimes acting as your own producer, director, set designer and dialogue coach.
In radio, there are no limits to the imaginative potential of the dramatist and to how the radio dramatist can express that potential. The sound medium is free of all the physical and practical limitations of the stage and film set. A radio play can move through any dimension of time and to any location. A radio play can voice metaphysical, surrealist and subconscious motivations and images.
The radio dramatist needs a creative intimacy with the listener to conjure a unique world in his or her imagination. Radio is very good at dramatising the contrast between what people say and what they think. Indeed, radio drama has been called the "theatre of the mind.""Interior thought" is a convention that is special to the radio medium; the listener is instantly transported inside the head of a character and can hear those secret, private thoughts that are often left unsaid. The medium liberates the scope of imaginative recall, providing a perfect opportunity to explore consciousness and dramatise all the voices that motivate different aspects of experience. Moving beyond the bounds of naturalism, radio drama can also give animals a voice, invest inanimate objects with character and give emotion to all aspects of nature.
"I remember once when I was rehearsing a staged reading of a play in New York, I brought along a tape recorder so that I could tape the run-through of the play. When I got home I cued the tape up to a particular scene I wanted to hear, and played it. I was amazed. The whole scene seemed transformed. Suddenly there was not the three actors saying the lines in a dingy church hall - just the mystery of words and voices on their own, a kind of pure music from which there seemed torn away a thousand limitations that my sight had imposed. The dialogue seemed bigger, broader, more magical; this was my first experience of what radio drama might be like.
The first play I sent to the BBC was a stage play I wanted to adapt for the radio. The producer who read it liked it, but he said it was firmly rooted in the stage, and would not make a good radio play. He suggested I write something for the radio directly, something more 'radiophonic'. But what did this mean? I tried to conceive of the play by imagining someone in a room with nothing in it but a box with sounds and voices coming out of it. The producer was right: imagining the telling of a story in this way not only changed the conventions I wanted to use, but actually the story itself. I came up with the idea of a young man who could not speak. Everyone at his work and his home would treat him as though he was intellectually inferior; but the audience of this play would be able to hear his thoughts; they would be able to hear that he was extremely sensitive and highly intelligent, making it all the more moving that the other people in the play never took the time to discover this. This device was a successful one, and it made the play work in a way it could never have worked in any other medium.
It could almost be said that the medium's limitations are also it strengths. Spectacle is out of the question - but for this reason you can furnish a room with a word, clothe and equip and mount an army with a phrase. Vegetables and trees can speak. And the unimaginable and the contradictory can be used without difficulty - for instance, if one of your characters is a woman so beautiful that men instantly die when they set eyes on her, the role would be impossible to cast in any other medium but not on radio. Equally, in the radio world there can be round squares, objects that are all black and all white simultaneously, buildings so tall that their roofs hit the bottom of the earth. You cannot see the frown on an actress's face, but this is little payment to make in exchange for the freedom the medium allows.
Besides, a frown on an actress's face can always be embedded in the dialogue. Often people writing plays will provide emotional clues for the actors to help them interpret lines, like 'angrily' or 'happily'. But, although these may sometimes be helpful to the actor, it is unwise to expect them to say the lines 'angrily' in exactly the same way you hear it in your head. Their idea of anger might be different from yours. But they will be expected to say the lines as you wrote them, so for this reason it's always better to avoid emotional cues at first and to try to make the line an angry line instead. This is particularly true on radio, when the actor's facial expressions cannot be seen, nor can their postures or movements; emotions and all other clues about a character's inner life are portrayed entirely by the vocal delivery.
The other main instrument you have at your disposal in telling a story on radio is sound, and there are several different uses of sound on the radio. One is music. Music can be used as part of a story - for instance, when one character plays a song to another on his record player - or as a score, when the music is not 'heard' by the characters, only the audience, and is used to enhance a scene, for instance to make it more romantic or suspenseful. Many writers and producers use pre-recorded music to score a play - rock, jazz, classical, or any other kind of music that might be appropriate - or a composer can be asked to write original music.
Another use of sound in radio plays is the collection of sounds used to create an atmosphere. If a scene takes place in a crowded restaurant, on a beach, at a football game, or in an airport lounge, you will want the acoustic and the other background sounds associated with whatever location you've chosen. The BBC has almost every imaginable setting already recorded for use in radio plays, and occasionally plays are even recorded in actual locations rather in a studio.
A third use of sound is the use of sound effects. Sometimes these could be additions to the background sounds - for instance, if the scene takes place in a car driving through the city, and suddenly the car has to swerve to avoid hitting another car or there could be distinct sounds that carry the action of your story a bit further, like someone knocking on the door, a siren approaching, or sudden thunder. I find it more satisfying to limit the sounds I use as much as possible, so that each sound will stand out as a clear step in advancing the story, rather than as contributing to a confusion of sounds, which can make them less potent or ultimately meaningless. For this reason, each sound should be carefully considered so that it will be given the proper weight in your play - neither too much nor too little.
The most important thing when writing a radio play is to hear it in your head as you write it. But never let it become too perfect in your head. The drama is a collaborative art form, and the director and the actors, as well as the technicians, will all have creative ideas that will help to take the play out of your head and onto the airwaves."
Craig Warner is a former Giles Cooper Award winner. His many produced radio plays include Down There Where The Old Shed Used to Be and Figure with Meat.
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