BOOKS & ARTS
Radio
Shining circles and
silver spools
Kate Chisholm
Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching
sounds, and then the most chilling screech
you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were
feeding off the carcass of a zebra in Kenya,
recorded by Chris Watson. He had been up
before dawn, on the look-out for a suitable
carcass to attract the scavenging vultures.
He was lucky to find one and clipped two
microphones to the ribcage, running the
cable to his recording vehicle 50 yards away.
By break of day the vultures had appeared
and were taking their breakfast.
Watson believes that recording sound at
such close quarters ‘really fires our imagi-
nations in a unique way’. He was not the
only contributor to The Changing Sound of
Radio on Radio 4 Extra (produced by Jes-
sica Treen) to talk about radio as if it is a vis-
ual medium. In this compilation of archive
programmes, threaded together by Watson’s
memories of a life spent in the field and back
in a studio creating sound art, it was as if wewere given snapshots of the best audio since
the 1960s when as a teenager Watson first
began recording. The sound of a blackbird at
full throttle in Thirteen Ways of Looking at
a Blackbird. The ‘snap, crackle and pop’ of
pistol shrimps, who use sound as a weapon,
stunning their victims, recorded by Watson
by attaching a microphone to a fishing line
and dangling it off the pier at Blyth harbour
in Northumberland. Haddock recorded out
at sea, in hectic courtship, described as ‘like a
motorbike revving up’.
Who needs pictures? In Fifteen Inches Per
Second, a 2004 documentary about quarter-
inch magnetic tape that revolutionised radio
(and was invented by the Germans during
the second world war), the feature-maker
Piers Plowright recalled his first experience
of walking into a studio and seeing ‘this place
of shining circles, things revolving slowly on
silver spools’. For him, the great delight of
working with magnetic tape, as opposed to
digital technology, was ‘the visual aspect of it’.
Watching the tape running through from reel
to reel, those precious 15 inches captured in a
second, was like going on a journey. Listening
to Plowright and his programmes would be
useful for budding podcasters who’ve never
experienced the limitations and yet expan-
siveness of analogue recording.
Heart and Soul on the World Service this
week was an exemplar of another kind of
radio feature, using not sound pictures butTheatre
This is a man’s world
Lloyd Evans
I’m Not Running
Lyttelton Theatre, in rep until
31 January 2019
Measure for Measure
Donmar Warehouse, until 1 December
Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to
chronicle the history of the Labour move-
ment from 1996 to the present day. But it
makes no mention of Corbyn, Momen-
tum, the anti-Semitism row or rumours of
a breakaway party. The drama is located in
the dead-safe Miliband era and it opens with
talk of a leadership election. The two best
candidates, Pauline and Jack, are old lov-
ers from university. Pauline is a doctor who
entered politics when budget cuts threat-
ened the hospital where her mother was
being treated for cancer. Jack is a colourless
Blairite greaser, a sort of Andy Burnham
without the mascara, who is still besotted
with Pauline despite being newly married
to Jessica.
The play kicks off with an announcement
from Pauline, who sits as an independent
MP, that she doesn’t covet the Labour lead-
ership. We then scoot back and watch the
pair as student lovers. Jack, the doting puppy,
remains faithful to Pauline even though she
keeps a busy roster of alternative playmates
on the go. Fast-forward, and we watch politi-
cian Pauline giving an interview in which she
rashly declares: ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’ A real
politician using that phrase on TV would
be haunted by it for the rest of her career.
Pauline is, of course, hiding two things. First,
her ambition to stand as leader. Second, her
Labour party membership while she was
an independent standing against a Labour
candidate, which she arranged without the
knowledge of her constituents. Such inept
mendacity would be swiftly uncovered dur-
ing a leadership contest. When Jack discov-
ers her secret manoeuvres, he fails to use this
toxic information to ruin her pitch for the
top job. Why? Any activist or A-level poli-
tics student could have helped Sir David to
avoid these blunders.
In one of the play’s dottiest scenes, Paul-
ine visits Jack at his marital home and asks
him to sign an important petition. She seduc-
es him on his wife’s sofa and when he declines
to give his signature she accuses him of sexu-
ally exploiting her. Her character is impos-
sible to scan. She’s partly a male fantasy, a
clever, beautiful, jealous minx who gobbles
up trusting chaps like Jack. And she’s partly
a door-slamming sourpuss who allows her-
self to be defined by injuries, many of them
imaginary, inflicted on her by nasty men.
It’s ironic that this study in progressive
feminism is an all-male achievement. Sir
David’s script, commissioned by the NT
boss, Rufus Norris, has been directed by
Neil Armfield. A woman on the team might
have helped them towards a more gener-
ous understanding of female psychology.
Pauline isn’t just sexually uninhibited, she’s
dangerous. In an early scene she hints that
she might accuse Jack of sexual assault. He
denies using force against her. ‘Your feelings
were violent,’ she says, suddenly telepath-
ic. ‘I’m not sure your motives were pure.’
This paranoid belief that all sexually active
women are likely to cry ‘rape’ is a nervous
male reaction to the #MeToo movement.
A final detail completes this nutty por-
trait of modern feminism: scullery duties.
Pauline is an enthusiastic oven bunny who
loves cooking lunch for visitors and baking
sourdough bread. Invited to a burial service,
she arrives with a tray of oven-fresh scones
for the mourners. Scones? At a funeral?
Real women should boycott, if not picket,
this slanderous assault on their sex.
Measure for Measure is full of surprises.
Josie Rourke’s handsome period produc-
tion sprints through a shortened version of
the text in barely 90 minutes. This is pru-
dent because the full-length script drags
towards the end as the Duke explains his
peculiar decision to act as Vienna’s under-
cover ombudsman. Then Rourke delivers a
stunning coup. The actors change into mod-
ern dress and the play begins afresh but with
the genders of the main characters reversed.
Hayley Atwell’s Isabel becomes a hypocriti-
cal predator targeting her victim, Angelo,
played by Jack Lowden. Everything is repeat-
ed in a fascinating contemporary setting with
plenty of witty flourishes. The brothel scene
shows a posse of dolled-up hookers, one with
a Russian accent, lounging on benches swip-
ing through their smartphones.
Some scenes are uncomfortable to
watch. Isabel, as the predatory deputy,
delivers the ‘who will believe thee?’ speech
by parodying the forced tears of a deceitful
rape victim. At times the script has to clear
impossible hurdles. It’s not credible that
Jack Lowden, or any sentient male earthling,
would decline an offer of no-strings sex with
Hayley Atwell.
These minor snags aside, this is the clever-
est application of gender-reversal to Shake-
speare that I’ve ever seen. And it deals with
a complaint often levelled against directors
who tinker with the Bard: newcomers to the
play deserve to see the original before they
can appreciate the departures and indul-
gences of the alternative version. And since
you get the text (or most of it) performed
twice at a single sitting it’s an excellent way
to cram for an examination.Real women should boycott,
if not picket, this slanderous
assault on their sexHaddock recorded out at sea, in
hectic courtship, sound ‘like a
motorbike revving up’