Radio
Tales of the unexpected
Kate ChisholmIt’s the oddest place to find a profound
meditation on the death of Christ, but there
it is on Radio 2 every year on the night of
Good Friday, on the ‘light music’ station,
and not on Radio 3 or Radio 4, where you
might expect to find it. This year At the Foot
of the Cross was sandwiched between Des-
mond Carrington — All Time Great and
Sara Cox’s disco beats, the uncompromis-
ing reflections on the nature of belief add-
ing a certain bite to the evening. Diane
Louise Jordan and her host of guests at the
Watford Colosseum (including the Bach
Choir and the tenor Wynne Evans) created
a sequence of words and music designed to
encourage us to think about the grief of the
disciples, the tyranny of Rome, the agony
of Christ as he walked towards Golgotha.
This syncretism, the serendipity with-
in the station schedules, goes back to the
BBC’s roots in the 1920s when there was
less division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art,
culture and entertainment, the schools of
science and the creative arts. The smooth
transitions between radically different pro-grammes uproot complacency by disrupt-
ing the usual flow with something not quite
in tune. When it works, the surprise gen-
erated by the unexpected intensifies the
experience of listening and creates a clar-
ity and immediacy of understanding. Even
if the Manga version of the Gospel story
on Friday night was a little rough, and not
quite King James, it was a refreshing way
to hear the events being told, in the words
of the street, as they might once have been,
while the Mozart excerpts, from his Requi-
em, provided consolation not by avoiding
the despair but by expressing it.
Another surprise was to find a play
about the writing of Bach’s St Matthew
Passion on Radio 4, and not on 3, where
you might have expected to come across it,
especially since this was much less a drama
than a tutorial on how to prepare for a per-
formance of Bach’s masterwork. In James
Runcie’s Bach: The Great Passion (direct-
ed by Eoin O’Callaghan), which goes out
on air this evening, midway through the
three-day vigil from Good Friday to Easter
Day, we hear Bach (played by Simon Rus-
sell Beale) schooling his choristers, mov-
ing them from G major to B minor while
asking them to imagine the pain of Christ’s
journey to the Cross, to draw it into them-
selves and make it personal.
This could have been rather stilted;Theatre
Law in action
Lloyd Evans
Consent
Dorfman, in rep until 17 May
The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?
Theatre Royal Haymarket, until 24 June
It’s like Raging Bull. The great Scorsese
movie asks if a professional boxer can
exclude violence from his family life. Nina
Raine’s new play Consent puts the same
question to criminal barristers. We meet
four lawyers engaged in cases of varying
unpleasantness who like to share a drink
after a long day in court. They gossip about
the more horrific behaviour of their clients
with frivolous and mocking detachment.
But when their personal relationships
start to falter under the strains of infidelity,
they’re unable to relinquish their profes-
sional expertise, and their homes become
legalistic battlefields. This sounds like a
small discovery but Raine turns it into a
grand canvas. At her best she can create
scenes that feel like eavesdropped conver-
sation rather than hand-crafted dialogue.
She writes male characters better than
most male dramatists and she captures pre-
cisely the sinuous and competitive glibness
of the masculine yuppie at play. Nor does
she care if her characters fail the sympa-
thy test. She presents people as they are
— lumpy, vain, malicious, self-deluding —
and she lets the actors add as much polish
as they can find.
This is an unashamedly London play full
of jokes about the Tube and ‘renting in Zone
Four’ and it doesn’t flinch from one of Lon-
don’s uglier truths. Residents of the capi-
tal regard all outsiders as imperfect human
beings and therefore inherently comic.
(Even provincial arrivistes like me assent to
this prejudice.) In one extraordinary scene,
two barristers offer tuition to an actress
seeking a role as a TV lawyer. By playful-
ly cross-examining each other they teach
her the tricks and histrionic effects used by
advocates to sway judges, to discredit wit-
nesses, and to smuggle prejudices into the
minds of juries. To cheat, that is, albeit within
the rules. But the tutorial spirals out of con-
trol when the lawyers realise that each has
a romantic interest in the actress, and their
bantering exhibition-piece turns into a sav-
age rutting session between two stags over a
broody female.
Dramatic writing rarely combines so
many virtues at once. It’s original, astute,
unnerving, sexy, funny, brutal, unpredictable
and multilayered. The last play of this cali-
bre that opened at the Dorfman was Peo-
ple, Places and Things. It transferred to New
York via the West End. This is a better show,
by some margin, and deserves to follow the
same flightpath.
For actors, typecasting is a form of
death. Hence the eternal romance between
movie stars and the West End. On stage,
an actor can exhibit elements of his talent
unknown to the screen. As a supplementa-
ry pleasure, he’s aware that directors and
producers cannot ‘skip through’ a theatre
piece as they can through a show reel or a
bad film. This may explain Damian Lewis’s
decision to play Martin, a twitchy oddball,
in Edward Albee’s sex-on-the-side drama.
Martin and Stevie are a prosperous cou-
ple enjoying their third decade of settled
maturity. But Martin has met an adorable
animal, a goat, with whom he has fallen
in love. Sylvia is the name of his cloven-
hoofed playmate.
When Stevie learns about her husband’s
excursions into livestock, the show develops
along two parallel paths. Farce and melodra-
ma. Martin reveals that he’s joined a ther-
apy group where beast-fanciers gather to
gossip, reminisce and celebrate their latest
triumphs in the farmyard. There he regular-
ly hobnobs with goose-gropers, dog-rutters,
pig-botherers and cattle-mounters and he
treats them all with the same easy tolerance
that he expects Stevie to extend to him.
That’s the farcical bit. Stevie reacts with fury,
tears, denunciations, threats and vandalism.
That’s the melodramatic bit.
None of it truly convinces. Martin’s
assertion that his weekends in the goat-pen
are as romantically satisfying as a human
affair sounds like an act of rhetoric rather
than an exploration of character. And Ste-
vie’s response makes her seem soppy, weak
and slightly deranged herself. The guy is
nuts, right? Completely lost it. And his idea
that dating goats might be socially accept-
able is a symptom of his mental breakdown.
Stevie misreads her husband’s sexual wan-
derings as a challenge to her attractiveness
and a violation of their marriage vows. It’s
neither. Their love is not diminished by
his bucolic trysts. It’s erased entirely. The
marriage is over. A goat? I mean seriously.
Instead of yelling at him she should tell the
cops, hire a shrink or call the farmer.
Eventually, she pursues one of those
options and her choice leads to a climax that
is as gory, daft and unbelievable as the build-
up. This is a sad, misbegotten thing. Too
bizarre to be genuinely tragic, too earnest to
be truly comic, too muddled to bear scrutiny.
The best joke is that Martin is a renowned
designer of skyscrapers who resides in a
beautiful antique mansion. So, like the rest
of his profession, he’s a modern (i.e. talent-
less) architect who lives in a home built by a
real (i.e. dead) one.Nina Raine captures precisely the
sinuous and competitive glibness of
the masculine yuppie at playThe surprise generated by the
unexpected intensifies the experience
of listening and creates a clarity