Yesterday an Incident Occurred

Producers and other professionals at the BBC used to talk informally about the "play to Hoover to" and the "play to clear lunch to." The idea was that the former's quality was so low that it didn't matter much if one heard all (or any) of it. The latter encompassed most of the higher-quality programming, but even this better stuff did not require a great deal of attention; clearing the dishes from lunch still involves some distracting clatter and a partial removal of one's mind from the play. It seems that all too infrequently did a play rise to the level of the play to simply sit down and listen to.

As I listen to more plays, I am developing my own critical vocabulary based on the hoover/dishes distinction. I have plays to mow the lawn to (with a manual push mower--not as loud as power mowers, so a basic farce or thriller play can withstand the noise), plays to rake leaves to, plays to do dishes to, and plays to hand or fold laundry to. Beckett, Dylan Thomas, and the Welles/Mercury/Campbell group are the only writers or producers of radio drama who have led me to sit down and listen without performing any accompanying housework. And even Beckett sometimes only rises to the level of the play to sift compost to (the most meditative and least distracting of all household chores or yard work.

In a way, I do not think that my tendency to form these categories (or, rather, to use radio drama thusly as aural accompaniment to other, more primary tasks) fairly denigrates the art form. If one can justify radio's blindness in artistic terms and argue successfully that its lack of visuals is not an aesthetic shortcoming, it is also true that this blindness encourages listeners to fill their visual field with some other activity. These other activities are often distracting. But then other artistic experiences offer their own distractions. I vividly recall not only the August Wilson play Jitney but also the incessant chattering of the many old couples watching the play with me in the Alley Theatre; not only the film 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould but also the make-out session in a carport that followed it; not only the film Wolf (okay, maybe that one is less vivid) but also the feeling of sweating and thinking I would pass out from the heat in the balcony of the sold-out Kabuki theater (and also the news footage of O.J.'s Bronco that I had been watching earlier in the day in that month of my high-school graduation. The point is, there is no such thing as the artistic experience that occurs in an isolated, pressurized chamber--no more for the consumer of art than for the producer. Far from lessening my experience of Mercury's Les Miserable or Thomas's Under Milk Wood, the dishes I washed or the leaves I raked while listening to those plays has only bound the two activities in my mind, so that those tedious household chores now bear the imaginative echo of the more memorable aural accompaniment they once shared.

That said, I would like to maintain the rating system based on household chores, and I am currently trying to apply an evaluative chore to the play Yesterday An Incident Occurred by Mark Ravenhill, which is the latest BBC offering that I've heard. For me it is technically a play to do the dishes to, and I haven't quite finished the play yet because my dishes ran out. It may be a sign of the play's quality that I did not extend it by moving on to folding the clothes that have been on the drying rack for the last two weeks. That is, by the time I had finished the dishes and listened to 30-40 minutes of it, I didn't think too highly of Yesterday An Incident Occurred.

When the play began, it actually seemed that it might be one for sitting down in a darkened room. Ravenhill, the author of Shopping and Fucking, seemed to take this commission (for BBC 3's "Free Thinking festival of ideas in Liverpool") seriously, and he seemed to understand the demands of the medium very well. The play was recorded, in the words of the online description from the BBC's website, "in the atmospheric Victorian civil court of St Georges Hall," which not only provides a great acoustic effect through the echoes of an imperial-era courtroom but also lends symbolic weight to the play's topic: the overreaching of the British justice system in the wake of Al-qaeda terrorist attacks. The play is formally stylized in a very nice way, with an Orwellian or Kafkaesque panel of vague authority figures leading cheers of "hurrah," chanted and repeated by the large-sounding live audience, after each statement of patriotic bromides. These go from benign and easily supportable to increasingly sinister and indefensible as the play goes on amid growing hysteria over an allegorical assault upon an innocent civilian.

The problem with the play is that its plot and the ideas it develops cannot match Ravenhill's formal and technical proficiency. While I was expecting the "Free Thinking" festival to present challenging ideas, this play offered only a predictable warning against the overreactions of those who seek safety through punitive measures like branding of those who fail to report on neighbors suspected of terrorism. While such seemingly absurd legal measures may indeed have their real-life equivalents in American torture policies and in the very aggressive security measures being implemented in the UK, by now the sort of people who listen to programs like BBC 3's festival of ideas are well aware of these excesses. And in any event, the play provides little human interest to sustain the heavy-handed lesson it is presenting. The characters are deliberately flat (the "man in the yellow tie," who ostensibly emerges out of the live, studio audience and into the spotlight as the reluctant informer who then demands his own punishment; the innocent object of the evil terrorist, who hates everything that his victim stands for); and part of the point is certainly that the media in a "democratic society" creates such caricatures of good and evil. But pointing this out does not make a great play, and this one seems to have little else to offer.

It seems that the enduring problem that radio drama faces is not the fact that listeners are almost inevitably distracted during broadcasts. What I am more concerned about is the perceived need to center plays on politics and current events. This may be a natural tendency on a medium that has such a vital role in presenting news. And the play of ideas can certainly come off well--I enjoyed the L.A. production of Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma very much. But many of the BBC plays push a message without attending to the artistic merit of the story.