Radio - Plays
[Where available, these are play scripts, not recordings.]
CIRCLING, 2021.
She turned him down first time. Now after three years & Covid, it seems there's a second chance. An exploration of online dating for oldies. Meanwhile the young waitress is taking notes...
On-line dating is now routine for younger lovers, but for oldies it remains a new & maybe intimidating prospect. Tho the play is a genuine love story & not a dry hitch-hiking guide for webbing crumblies, it does finesse some basic knowledge of this new terrain.
The emotional curve of the play is from suspicion towards engagement, but the journey is not straightforward & has its doubts & confrontations. It also has teasing moments & bonding laughter.
In a short space, backstories emerge in an easy, natural way & we share the hopes & desires of these three strangers. We also glimpse some misconceptions that arise from ageist assumptions.
PERSONS OF THE DRAMA:
JOLENE: a young barista, temping while she tries to get into drama school. Deep speaking voice & a good singing mezzo. Broad regional accent, here presented as cockney, but could be varied.
KEN: late 60's, self-educated & well-spoken working class, superficially confident. A retired kitchen fitter, now crafting fiddles as a hobby. Thoughtful & enquiring.
RONNIE: late 60's, a widow, lower middle-class. Retired physiotherapist, now studying an 'alternative' therapy. Quick, bright energy.
HISTORIC TIME: The present day, 2021.
RUNNING TIME: Approximately 43 minutes.
Circling © Copyright: Alan McMurtrie, 2021
THE EPIPHANY OF MRS TILTON, 1967.
The Epiphany of Mrs Tilton is the first part of a trilogy never completed. The Trilogy was to centre on the Henry Ward Beecher scandal, 1867-78, & to be entitled (as a whole) Neighbour Beecher out-of-doors.
Beecher was Minister of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, a powerful preacher, & probably (in his time) the leading evangelist of America. He believed that sexuality was sacred & in no way a sin (which is fine & dandy by me) except he said it not from the pulpit, but in secret to the wives of his parishioners.
Thus the Trilogy's principal concerns were to be male hypocrisy & the feminist struggle in 19th Century America.
Lib Tilton would probably have managed very well in an age of clearly defined moral values. She was loving, loyal & she hungered to do what seemed pure & sacred. Only, what was pure & sacred? It was her tragedy that her lover Beecher (but also her husband) were caught up in a shift of sexual morality which the preacher shied away from acknowledging in public, & which would indeed remain a motive for two-faced scandal until World Wars & the Pill had shaken people's lives.
Saddest of all, it was Elizabeth Tilton's idealism that Beecher invoked for his own confused & not altogether spiritual purposes.
KONSTANTINA, 1973.
The question of intersex has recently been much in the news. But the scandal of a possibly intersex athlete is not new. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, some East European countries were tempted to win athletic success by running intersex athletes as women. In the 70's, rumour & innuendo were rife.
The play tells the story of one such (fictional) athlete, Konstantina Slov, who within metres of an Olympic Gold Medal runs off the track & asks for political asylum. This is Munich 1972, & Konstantina's tragedy is played out against a Cold War climate of suspicion & mutual accusation. She quickly becomes a pawn in a bigger, brutal game that sees her feelings & needs as secondary.
On the face of it, this is a Cold War drama, but it highlights issues about the binary perception of the human spectrum. Either/or, male/female. The tyranny of labels. By examining in some detail the physical variety of what is human, the script can hope to throw light & compassion on the shame some children still have to suffer, especially in less enlightened communities.
On an artistic level, the script explores radiophony & a measure of kaleidoscopic structuring that seek to evoke an ethos of suspicion, but also tease the frame of perception & the easy assumption of either/or. The ending, as written, ruptures the frame.
Some background
In 1970 I was trying to break into Television. I offered THE WASHINGTON PLAY, a challenging plea against racism, to BBC 2. It was rejected, but won me an interview. I then offered TOLSTOI'S WEDDING NIGHT, a tightly written insight into cultural history. It too was rejected. But when I suggested a rather simple story, LAYING IT OFF FOR SPANGLE, about the Mexico World Cup, it was commissioned, accepted & broadcast.
I had learnt a painful lesson. The wise editors at the BBC were showing easy popularist entertainment, not because nothing deeper or more demanding was to hand, but because unthinking entertainment was what they wanted.
I saw that SPANGLE was acceptable because it was about soccer. Could I write a piece about another popularist topic, say athletics (& so creep under their radar) but with more depth than SPANGLE? This was the germ of KONSTANTINA (1973), athletics, yes, & spying, but with something to say about the tyranny of labels.
Richard Imison, head of the BBC Radio Script Unit, valued the piece, & had found a producer “keen to do it”. I have a letter from Richard Imison (4-6-73) where he apologises for the blindness (or was it cowardice?) of his masters:
“It is rare for me to find myself at quite such odds
with those to whom I work...”
I had been unable to square the circle after all.
KEYS, 1979-80
(Broadcast Sunday 27th December 1981 on Radio 3 & later on World Service as MAURICE NOW.)
Maurice was once an aspiring young concert pianist. A traumatic event lost him his confidence & he never played again in public. Now he has the chance of a comeback & as he rehearses Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, his past returns to challenge him.
In those days, recordings were bulky, took up space & the Beeb let this one go, but (by an amazing chance) I happened upon a good quality bootleg, extracts of which are available FREE at FREEBIE.
Here you have the script whole & entire. Keys was my original title, but BBC Radio Drama had another script with that title already under contract, so I was obliged to change mine. In the event the other script was never broadcast (I know the feeling!) & as Keys is a better title, alluding both to the keyboard & an inner enquiry for lost meanings, I have restored it.
NOW, a 15 minute play for radio, 1979.
A meditation on transience & growing old with dignity. Set in Ayr, Scotland, partly in Lowland Scots.
The old man is sleeping.
The sun still leaps the council towers into the clematis.
Here I am in a temporary garden
my great-great-grandfather planted,
eating his fruit.
This piece is based on a chance encounter with my grand-father's cousin. (See also: preface to Cleopatra on the audio-stories timeline.)
TINTAGEL, a Romance for Radio, 1982.
Tintagel explores the psychological impact of a heart transplant before & after surgery. Alive with new energy, Phil sidesteps common sense & goes in search of his donor's family...
Medical drama & fiction is now ten-a-penny. But in 1982 this fable was considered too challenging (or distasteful?) for broadcast.
SPARROW, an audio-play for three voices & a bird, 2007.
August 1988, North London. At first glance, a moving & sensitive story about a bright eight-year-old, her Grandad, their tame sparrow & a distant auntie from America. But the deeper narrative of family dysfunction lurks back to the Burma Railway, & shadowing their present crisis (emotional & financial) is the heartlessness of Sadam Hussain. So we are also dealing with the personal legacy of atrocity.
The account of PEEPS the sparrow is taken from the author's own experience.
All prefaces & blurbs: © Alan McMurtrie, 2018.