Sunday, October 21, 2012

The Best of Halloween Audio


The Best of Halloween audio
31 29 unsettling, spooky, and downright scary plays from around the world

The unsettling
Every Now and Then
by George Zarr
Voices in the Wind

Cromwell’s Talking Head
by Gareth Calway
Room 29
http://pparadio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/cromwells-talking-head.html

The Shining Guest
by Paul Evans
BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play (September 2011)
One of the most unusual and arresting plays I’ve heard in a long time, combining two things that would never go together—documentary style so close to what you actually hear on Radio 4 and a truly weird way of explaining paranormal phenomenon—as time shifting continually over imprinted places in nature.  An Iron Age woman in a Victorian grave with a 1980s hair clip and a submerged Welsh village.  I’m not sure I understood it all, but it was the kind of story that validates radio drama as an art form.  

A House to Let
by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, et al
Starring Marcia Warren, Sam Dale, Miranda Keeley, Stephen Critchlow, Warwick Davis
Dir. Ned Shyay
BBC Radio4extra
This was enjoyably eclectic, with a would-be ghost story, the tale of a sideshow dwarf, and the unusual relationship between a spinster and her manservant. 

Hercule Poirot:  Halloween Party
by Agatha Christie, adapted by Michael Bakewell
starring John Moffatt, Stephanie Cole, Alexandra Bastido, Siann Jenkins, June Bary, Gareth Armstrong
dir. Ellen Williams
BBC Radio4extra
This required very close attention, but Poirot was fun, the self-parody of Agatha Christine who sounded more like Miss Marple, a credible assistant, and the whole creepiness of the story—all these girls, and a certain degree of a scandal at a school—contributed to the setting, a girl being drowned in a tub used for bobbing for apples was macabre indeed, but the pseudo-pagan ritual sacrifice made it almost like a Doctor Who sleuthing tale.

Night Talker 
by Danny John-Jules
starring Nicholas Boulton, Harry Myers, Stuart Mclaughlin
dir. Ann Edivoe
BBC Radio4extra (2008)
This was written by the Cat from Red Dwarf.  All thoughts of celebrity aside, this was a delightful gem broadcast on BBC7 in the days leading up to Halloween.  For a 20-minute play this was superb.  Night DJ Andy Stone is a jerk, putting his listeners and co-workers down, but in the course of a few minutes we learn he lost his twin brother, his birthday is Halloween, he hasn’t seen his parents in years, and he’s in love with his producer!  Was it spooks in the studio? 

Frank             
by Ian McMillan
starring Kevin Eldon, Glenn Cunningham, Deborah McAndrew, James Quinn
BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play (31 October 2008)
I really didn’t like this for the first few minutes and was considering turning it off, but I persevered.  It was altogether too silly, obsessed with rhubarb—and then the play finally got going and started to make me laugh. The idea of a frustrated Yorkshire rhubarb farmer wanting to get his dole benefits by making his doppelganger do his work is funny enough.  But the fact that Frankie “the monster” is Scottish and far sexier than Frank his maker is outrageous.  I also really liked the ending—very sly.   

The Monster Hunters
by Matthew Woodcock and Peter Davis
Newgate Productions
http://pparadio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/monster-hunters.html

Caligari
by Amanda Dalton
starring Peter Hamilton Dyer, Tom Ferguson, Eileen O’Brien, Sarah McDnald-Hughes, Robin Blaze
dir. Susan Roberts
BBC Radio 4 (2008)
This was a very ambitious experiment, and even if perhaps it didn’t all come together, it was very memorable.  It’s an attempt to shift German Expressionism from the silent film—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—into radio.  I hadn’t seen the film until after I heard the play, so I went out and rented it (this was right around Halloween).  Both play and film share an atmosphere of dreamy menace, where nothing is quite what it seems, and both are quite frightening in places (or I should say, disturbing).  Caligari himself did not have a speaking role in the play, but Césare, his sideshow somnambulist, was sung by a counter-tenor.  This is very interesting in regards to the film, in which Césare did not speak.  The play also added a militant soldier-fool (with a northern accent) who was a particularly well-realized character (for passing judgement on World War I). 

The Spooky
Flight of a Witch
by Ellis Peters, adapted by Sally Hedges
starring Iwan Thomas, Rob Spendler, Michael Tudor Barnes, Deborah Boleyn
dir. Sue Williams
BBC Radio 4extra (2009)
A mystery with the touch of the supernatural.  Great music by Anthea Gomez and great sound effects subtly shaded us toward the narrator’s predisposition toward some kind of spooky explanation.  There was the historical story of the early 18th century Welsh girl who got lost in the mountain, and though the story was old-fashioned enough for the 1960s, what with girls running away to meet their lovers in Birmingham clandestinely, I figured out the murderer, which is rare.  Everyone thought there was something witch-like about Annet Beck, and we never found out who her real father was.  The PC and his brother the narrator were a toned-down comedy duo. 

The Female Ghost: Man-Sized Marble
by Enid Nesbitt, adapted by Chris Hawes
starring Carolyn Jones, Stephen Critchlow
dir. Mary Nancary
BBC Radio 4 (1997)
Spooky little tale; the mood and the bittersweetness were striking—two poor but happy artists in their little cottage, the superstitious local woman, the Irish nationalist doctor . . . and two marble villains who come out of their tombs to kill them!  

The Female Ghost:  The Cold Embrace
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, adapted by Mary Nancary
starring Stephanie Turner, Jonathan Firth, Alison Petit, Ioan Meredith
dir. Mary Nancary
BBC Radio 4 (1997)
The narration by Mary Elizabeth, which normally annoys me, actually worked really well.  A selfish German artist abandons his fiancée, and she drowns herself.  He feels her cold embrace whenever he’s alone, and it ruins his life.  The final scene is at the Paris Opera at the Shrovetide Ball, which I loved.  Firth was perfect, even managing to evoke some pity at the end.  Very spooky. 

The Woman in Black
by Susan Hill, adapted by John Strickland
starring Robert Glenister, John Woodvine, Stuart Richmond, James Quinn
dir. Chris Wallace
BBC Radio4extra
I have read The Woman in Black, seen the touring stage show, and have seen the film.  I like it in all forms, and although the film version caused me to jump in my seat all the way through, there is an effective and eerie menace in the radio adaptation, which is from the early 1990s.  I maintain that the scene with the dog Spider getting sucked in the marshlands mud is best in this radio version—nothing yet has topped its edge-of-your-seat suspense. 

Faust
by Martin Jenkin
starring Mark Gatiss, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Thom Tuck, Jasmine Hyde, Pippa Hayward
BBC Radio 4 (2010)
Superb.  Mephistophéles was able to inhabit “our” time and to there were some absolutely spot on jokes (Merthyr Tydfil!!).   I’ve heard Gatiss do a lot of radio, but this was his best performance—suave but much more threatening than Sherlock’s brother!  This was the version of Faust that doesn’t end happily like Goethe’s—Gretchen’s life is bad but she does end up in Heaven (at least according to Mephistophéles—we don’t know if he was lying or not).  A good edition for Halloween, but more pertinently, just a really cool idea, with the contemporary music and 5 x 15 min segments. 

Voices from the Grave:  50, Berkeley Square
by Dylan Ritterson
starring Sophie Roberts, Harry Myers, John Cummings
dir. Gemma Jenkins
BBC Radio4extra
Pleasant, eerie little ghost story, set some time in the 19th century, where a lady of the night and two sailors break into the most haunted house in Britain.  She escapes; they pay with their life and sanity. 

Weird Tales: Connected
by Melissa Murray
starring Fiona Glascott, Joseph Klowksa, Ewan Hooper
BBC Radio4extra (2010)
Certainly thinking in four dimensions:  Steph ended up in a submarine to nowhere banging on the radiator pipes of her widower!  She’d been phoned by her dead brother-in-law who was so selfish, he took her with him!  The idea of every mobile in the shop ringing as you walk in is a bit of contemporary creepiness. 

Weird Tales:  Rounder
by Ed Hime
starring Joseph Klowska, Lizzie Watts, Jonathan Taffler
dir. Jessica Dromgoole
BBC Radio4extra (2010)
This took a bit of an effort to understand—it gives us unsettling theories about what might go on in a comatose person’s head.  The way it came together in the end with the music, repetition, and revelations equalled anything Steven Moffat could come up with, I think.  The image of three people clinging to the Ferris Wheel falling out of the sky was pretty horrific.

Carmilla by J S LeFanu, adapted by Don McCanfield
Starring Anne-Marie Duff, Brenda Baicz, David Warner, Celia Imrie, Kenneth Cranham, Nigel Anthony
BBC Radio 4
An absolutely haunting adaptation of the novel, full of sensual atmosphere and beautiful performances from Laura and Carmilla.  The music is an integral part of a well-paced remembrance, narrated by Laura, and contains none of the gore associated with the BBC Dracula adaptation from 1998.  It is a tragic love story, in fact, and treated as such. 

The Strange Case of Spring Heel’d Jack
by Gareth Parker and Robert Valentine
The Wireless Theatre Company

The Scary
Fear on Four:  Hand in Glove
by Elizabeth Bowen, adapted by Elizabeth Troop
starring Edward deSouza, Majorie Westbury, Kate Finche, Elizabeth Hays-McCoy
directed by Peter Fozzard
BBC Radio4extra
A really disturbing play.  You could, really, pin all the horror down to a society of women defined by their relationship to men—if Aunt Alicia’s husband hadn’t shot himself, she wouldn’t be at the mercy of “elder abuse” from her niece Ethel, who in turn wouldn’t be so callous (we assume) if she wasn’t a disenfranchised spinster.  Hints of Poe and Faulkner as Ethel got strangled by her aunt’s disembodied gloves.  Yeeek.

The Darker Side of the Border:  Olalla
by Robert Louis Stevenson, adapted by Marty Ross
starring Paul Blair, Richard Conlin, Carol Ann Crawford, Alexandra Pope
dir. Bruce Young
BBC Radio 4 (2010)
Having since read the original tale and researched it, I am even more impressed at the way Ross managed to bring clarity and a sense of violent dread to Stevenson’s rather diffuse original.  The original is not necessarily a vampire tale, but the adaptation has used the romance and the horror of a tale of degeneration in the most Gothic sense. 

Dracula
by Bram Stoker, adapted by Nick McCarty
starring Bernard Holly, Frederick Jaeger, Phyllis Logan, Sharon Maharaj, Philly Walsh
dir. Hamish Wilson
BBC Radio 4 (1998)
This year, and not too long in coming, there is another BBC adaptation of this wonderful novel; it condenses the novel into two parts, which is quite ambitious, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s done.  This comprehensive 7-part version is excellent, especially its depiction of Jonathan being attacked by the Brides and the staking of Lucy scenes.  Frederick Jaeger makes a Dracula very faithful to the book, and the creative way in which it gets Jonathan to relate back his experiences makes for gripping listening.  Also it is not above making little in-jokes, and has considerably enlarged the characters of Holmwood and Morris. The music and sound effects are superb.

Voices from the Grave:  The Parson
by David Varella
starring Mark Basley, Geoffrey Beevers, Wayne Foscott
dir. Luke Frayle
BBC Radio4extra
Easily the best of this series—extremely scary, but at least the disillusioned parson fought old magic/darkness and won!  It was relevant and also moved quickly, the characters weren’t stiff.  “The Lottery” + Vicar of Dibley + “Curse of Fenric” + Hotel Rwanda.
  
The Voyage of the Demeter  
by Robert Forrest
starring Finlay Welsh, Gary Lewis, Steven McNicoll, Grant O’Rourke, Alexander Morton
dir. Patrick Rayner
BBC Radio 4 (2009)
This is one of my favorite radio plays of all time, and extremely scary to listen to in the dark on Halloween!  Robert Forrest has done a tremendous job filling in the blanks left by Stoker, when the Russian captain of the Demeter, bound to Whitby from Varna, slowly loses control of his crew, his ship, and his sanity as Dracula slowly takes over.  Dracula (“The Stranger”) is terrifyingly evoked and the whole play whips up at atmosphere of supernatural horror with sensational music and sound effects.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Fridays When It Rains
by Nick Warburton
starring Lyndsey Marsal and Clive Swift
dir. Claire Grove  
BBC Radio 4 (2010)
Overall this is one of the best radio thrillers I have ever heard.  I have since figured out that Warburton uses the same motifs a lot, and that somewhat lessens the startling originality, but that’s of little consequence.  This was creepy in the extreme with some excellent mood music.  Starring only Lyndsey Marshall as the girl and Clive Swift as the man, the suspense and the dialogue were perfectly pitched.  Swift was terrifying.  I remember sitting in the living room staring out the window gripping my seat because I was on the edge of it!  There’s no doubt I loved the fact it took place entirely on a steam train in 1910, 1964, and the present day.  I have since realized that Nick Warburton is one of the best radio dramatists the BBC has ever had.

Weird Tales:  The Loop
by Chris Harrald
starring David Stretfield, Steven Hogan, Stephen Critchlow, Paul Rider
dir. Faith Collingwood
BBC Radio 4extra
This was pretty scary, and as such moved quickly purely as a horror tale (the mechanisms left totally unexplained at the end).  Set in 1906 in a Tube expansion tunnel, the skeleton discovered is just the beginning of horrors emerging from a black slab and a sealed chamber.  I was disturbed.

All the Dark Corners:  Something in the Water
by Paul Cornell
Starring James Nickerson, Zara Turner, Joel Davies, Conrad Nelson, Jonathan Keeble
Dir. Nadia Molinari
BBC Radio 4 (2011)
This got a bit hysterical in the end, and I think Cornell had been watching “The Daemons” before he wrote it, but overall I quite liked the way it sidestepped the plesiosaur explanation and managed not to debunk mystery completely by making the Lake monster into a fibrous bio-organism in symbiosis with the town itself.  It worked surprisingly well for radio. 

The Woods
Icebox Radio Theater

Echo Point
by Louis Noura
starring Brandon Burke, Lucy Bell, John Gaden, Russell Kiefel, Stewart D’Arrietta, Asher DeGrey
dir. Judith Kampfer
BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play (2012)
I like when we get to hear Australian plays on BBC, and this one’s unusual setting hooked me.  It’s a haunted house story from an urban explorer’s dream, set in an old sanatorium in isolated New South Wales.  It is a marvellous creepy tale because all the ghostly manifestations can be explained by mental illness; that doesn’t make it any less disturbing. 

I hope YOU will supply the last two plays to round out the collection!


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