Tom Stoppard Radioactive: A Sounding of the Radio Plays

Tom Stoppard Radioactive: A Sounding of the Radio Plays KATHERINE E. KELLY Tom Stoppard typifies many British dramatists in having written for the radio early in his career. The aural medium attracts the promising playwright for several reasons, not the least ofwhich is the British Broadcasting Corporation's history ofcreating and promoting serious radio drama as a distinct genre. ' It has become commonplace to argue that virtually all important modem British playwrights started in radio, a far more accessible medium than the stage or screen, and one that promises the novice writer an audience that can number in the millions.2 The practical benefits of writing for radio are fairly obvious: it requires less time and money to produce for this medium than it does for the stage or screen, which in tum minimizes the risk of financial or artistic failure. As a result, as many as six hundred new plays are produced annually by BBC radio alone3 But in addition to its accessibility, radio offers aspiring playwrights highly defined limits, both aesthetic and practical, within which to perfect their craft. From I964 to I972, Stoppard wrote six radio plays, half of them for the BBC's "Third Programme," later called "Radio 3,"4 through which he gradually developed his own rhetoric of radio drama as he discovered its suggestive possibilities. His first pair of plays, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and "M" isfor Moon Among Other Things, both fifteen-minute pieces written (unsolicited) in I964 for the series "Just Before Midnight," showed sufficient promise to attract the attention of Richard lmison of the BBC, who commissioned further radio plays. The Dissolution has all of the earmarks of early Stoppardian dramaturgy: a self-effacing character trapped absurdly in a situation of his own devising and propelled logically, if ludicrously, towards complete dissolution. The continuous action consists entirely of Dominic, a young accountant, riding frantically about town in a taxi in an effort to payoff its running meter. Dominic loses the race, cut off from financial relief by his embarrassed efforts to conceal his poverty. While riding from bank to bank, Tom Stoppard Radioactive 441 stopping off to collect from indebted friends, to borrow (yet again) from his parents and even his fiancee, all to no avail, the meter continues to tick and eventually drives him to sell his clothes and furniture to the cab driver to senle his debt. He ends up unemployed, unengaged, and dressed in pajamas clothing that seems to hold a special appeal for the playwright. The picaresque structure of the plot suits the spatial freedom of the medium while rivening our anention on the continuous passing oftime as registered by the meter (inaudible in the broadcast I listened to) and Dominic's anxious counting of change. By the time his dissolution comes, it has the effect of a well-timed punch line. The meterjoke, hardly the stuffofgreat drama, could not sustain a play much longer than this one, but, together with other time-marking techniques, it makes for an amusing fifteen minutes of sound play. Broadcast approximately six weeks later, on 6 April 1964, the second in this set ofplays is weaker in plot but stronger in characterization. "M" isfor Moon Among Other Things hegan, according to the author, as a short story and was later revised for the radio.5 While Stoppard wrote Dissolution primarily as a one character play, "M" requires two voices, Alfred and Constance, married, middle-aged, middle-class, and childless. Stoppard gives each memher of the couple a distinctive speech and preoccupation that manages to set the terms of their comic misunderstanding within the first few moments of air time. Constance, like Dominic, marks time by resorting to mechanical tasks. As the play opens, she has reached the lener"M" in The UniversalTreasury ofPeople, Places and Things. As Constance tells Alfred, she will tum forty-two and a half precisely at 10:30 p.m. that evening. "Forty-two-and-a-half, and all I've got is a headache." "Where's it all going?" she wonders.6 While she ponders aging and the apparent pointlessness of her life, uncomprehending Alfred daydreams about owning lUXUry cars and rescuing young women in...