Sunday, September 30, 2012

Killing the Devil


I’ve heard a few things from Tin Can Podcast before . . . they seem to specialize in the very short form.  As such, they tend to present scenes or vignettes rather than fully fledged plays.  Killing the Devil was an interesting piece, though I do think its brevity created the connection in my mind with a similarly-themed play excerpt performed by an up-and-coming writer during last year’s Rough Diamonds (Swansea University’s outgoing MA students) at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.  Written by Jonathan Brown, this piece starred Alex Hughes as a journalist and Fiona McKinnon as a mother of a boy murdered by religious fundamentalists.  His murder causes her to return to the Middle East, from which she had escaped to live a teacher’s life in a London suburb.  

Killing the Devil is a play about morality and as such, its soundworld deposits us somewhere we know (or think we know) from innumerable news broadcasts and soundbytes.  I think audio plays really succeed at one of two extremes:  a mundane or at least well-known, familiar setting where something unexpected happens, or somewhere that can only be imagined or painted with pictures in the mind.  Obviously Killing the Devil is the former and this helps make the play food for thought.

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