The Return of the Radio Play
Author: CBOnline | Source: CBOnline | Date: 04-11-04
- The ominous toll of an old church bell, the frantic rhythm of panicked feet running down a hallway. A female voice screams “Oh my god, she’s dead, she’s dead…”
The radio play is coming back thanks to community radio.
Community radio stations around Australia are reviving and reinventing the art of radio drama, exposing a lost art form to a whole new audience. Melbourne’s 3RRR and Sydney’s FBi Radio have been turning broadcasts into live spectacles, with audience participation and entertainment at the fore. Meanwhile, others are bringing the drama of the classic radio plays of the 40's and 50's to old and new listeners alike.
Everything Old is New Again
- One of the key players in the new generation of radio dramatists is Laura Milke, who has worked in sound design for theatre, lectured in radio studies and produced two films for the 2003 Tropfest short film festival. According to Milke, "the radio play isn't dead, its just been sleeping".
Laura combined her love of theatre and radio, founding 'Whodunnit' Productions in 2002 with a group of like-minded actors and producers, to present a radio drama series for the Melbourne Fringe Festival, broadcast live on Triple RRR. The scripts, performed during the 2002 season, were a standout success, winning the festival's Directors Choice Award.
The radio plays returned in 2003, dubbed the "runaway success of the fringe" by The Age newspaper and won Laura and 3RRR that year's Community Broadcasting Association of Australia award for ‘Most Innovative Program’.
Based on the reputation that the Whodunnit events had built up at the Melbourne Fringe, Laura was recruited by youth station FBi to direct a series of three plays as part of the station's first birthday celebrations in September. The project, run in collaboration with the Sydney Opera House Studio, started with a call for scripts from the radio station’s audience. With plays having to be comedies and be set in Sydney, it was opportunity for the station to skewer some stereotypes and superficialities of urban living. Performed and broadcast over three consecutive Sunday nights with different casts, the plays showcased the acting talents of SBS's Jamie Leonarder, spoken word artist Tug Dumbly and musicians Emma Tom, Spod and Machine Gun Fellatio's Chit Chat – and owed a lot to a hard working sound effects team and audience participation.
And what was the reaction? “We got all sorts of really great feedback, from both the audiences – the one that was listening and the one that was there live”, says Meagan Loader, FBi’s Program Manager. “People were telling us that they didn’t quite know what to expect, but were really entertained by what happened.”
Theatre of The Mind
- Although Laura Milke and Whodunnit represent a new take on the tradition of radio drama, the listeners and supporters of community radio around Australia still have an ear for the classics of the genre. Sydney’s 2RPH recently held a gala fundraising event at the Belvoir St Theatre, presenting episodes of classic 40's and 50's Australian radio drama. Veteran broadcaster Bob Rogers compered the evening and the cast of John Bell, of Bell Shakespeare, Jackie Weaver, Jacqueline Kott and Alistair Duncan, performed excerpts from ‘Ada & Elsie’, ‘Dad & Dave’, ‘Larry Kent – I Hate Crime’ and ‘Doctor Paul’. ABC veteran Peter Wilkinson provided sound effects for the sold out crowd.
Bruce Leonard, a radio historian and archivist working with ScreenSound Australia, provided the scripts for the 2RPH event, and also researches and presents the weekly ‘Theatre Of The Mind’ program, produced at 2NSB and broadcast nationally on the Community Radio Network. ‘Theatre Of The Mind’, now in it’s sixth year of broadcasting, is a weekly trip back to an era when the fictional Snake Gully Cup, broadcast on the same day as the Melbourne Cup as part of the ‘Dad and Dave’ program, was on every bookie’s tote and inspired office sweeps.
“I was doing contract work for ScreenSound and got the idea to broadcast the shows that I was working on, originally just through 2NSB”, says Leonard. “People remember these programs with such great fondness and we get requests for episodes and series from listeners”. With the national reach of the Community Radio Network, Leonard also made contact with other enthusiasts and “people who’d grabbed the transcription tapes before they were going to be thrown out” to expand the available collection.
“It’s primarily a nostalgia show, but we’re also educating a new audience. I get lots of requests for extra information about the programs – the name of a particular song or who the actors were.”
How does Bruce Leonard explain the popularity and enduring interest in radio drama?
“With television, I always say, everyone hears the same sound and sees the same picture. But with radio, everyone hears the same sound but sees completely different, individual, pictures of the places and people – it’s why the program’s called what it is. It’s truly theatre of the mind”.
And maybe the power and unique qualities of radio drama won’t be lost on a new generation of listeners, with Whodunnit returning to the Melbourne Fringe Festival for the 2004 season. This time they successfully broadcast from the historic Astor Theatre in St Kilda, a marked step up from where Laura and Whodunnit started out at The Rooftop Cafe in Fitzroy. But the continuing achievements of Whodunnit are aided by the support of the community broadcasters like FBi and RRR, providing infrastructure and airtime access to creative projects and new ideas. Removed from the imperatives and pressures of commercial radio, and with a listener base willing to engage with something a little different, community broadcasters can work to foster trends, take risks and produce innovative programming.
Listen to an excerpt from 'Theatre Of The Mind', hosted by Bruce Leonard and broadcast on the Community Radio Satellite: Download the Mp3 (2.88 MB)