Going on a surreal holiday

Radio review 

The Stage  09/09/1999 


John Hegley is the man of the moment in radio drama - his jaunty jingles are everywhere. Fresh from his zany children's play last month, September saw his first comedy series, The Adventures of John and Tony (R4, from Tuesday, September 7).

Hegley played John, with Simon Munnery (alias Alan Parker, Urban Warrior), in his first acting role as the bossy Tony. It was a small step from his identity as a performance poet, for not only did his characterisation of John veer more towards performance than acting, much of his material in the first story, A Tale of Two Tenting, consisted of his idiosyncratic rhymes.

The tone was absurdist, a Through the Looking Glass fable for adults in which conventional forms of behaviour were reversed and life dictated by a dream-like logic. The narrative had the pair on the first of four surreal holidays setting up camp in a world in which Carry On met the Famous Five, underpinned by a Dario Fo-style exuberance.

The characters were mere ciphers, a conduit for puns, word- play and rhymes which they juggled like circus performers. Even a brief power struggle between John and Tony was speedily decided. Clutching his copy of the Scoutmasters' Annual, Tony announced that he would be known as Skipper. John wanted to know if he could combine Skip and Tone and call him Scone, but this was firmly refused.

There was humour so silly it made you laugh ("I'm going to brush my teeth." "What about the toast?" "I've brushed that already"), ludicrous rhymes (puppet with gutted) and a childish sense of joy in runaway versifying ("We're champing for camping, itching for pitching"), all set to the perfect score, a giddy fairground medley by Nigel Piper.

The combination of science fiction and comedy has formed a genre which is no doubt well understood by its fans. The new series Routemasters (R4, from Wednesday, September 8) exhibited that vital characteristic of eccentricity shading into weirdness, leaving those of us who find Red Dwarf a challenge sitting there without mouths agape.

Writer Andrew McGibbon, who also played the weaselly Raymond, has concocted a theme which pays homage to sci-fi's most cherished preoccupation, time-travelling. Raymond, tweaked by the power behind the throne, Hildegard (Amanda Donohoe in her first radio role), zoomed through the aeons stealing art treasures to take to the 30th century.

The journey began on a night bus to south London, the N44 captained by Karl Minns and assisted by a bewildered passenger Bernie, played by Owen Evans. (Minns and Evans are also known in another life as the Nimms Twins).

The first episode took them to 16th-century Rome where Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel was in peril. Once we got to the Eternal City the tone changed from Dr Who (with a dash of On the Buses) to a Frankie Howerd Up Pompeii! lark. Meanwhile the characters gently lashing each other with insults ("My little darling moron"), were pummelled into life by the actors being very actorish in a sci-fi comedy sort of way.

The 16 actors who played 63 characters in Goethe's Ironhand (R3, from Saturday, August 28) were suitably reverential in their treatment of the material, part of the Weimar Weekend schedule to mark the 250th anniversary of the German poet's birth. The mammoth production stretching over two evenings took on John Arden's adaptation which received only one stage run at the Bristol Old Vic in 1963.

An account of the feuding barons of 16th-century Germany, it was heralded as providing parallels with contemporary Europe and this proved its greatest

fascination.

The marathon gorging sessions, the corruption and the conspiracy reminded one of recent controversies within the European economic and parliamentary groupings.

Prominent among the cast were David Calder in a powerful performance as the eponymous von Berlichingen who saw himself as the arbiter of moral right, Stephen Critchlow as his sometime friend Weislingen and Kate Duchene as scheming seductress Adelheid.

The latter was a vixen to match the cruel machinations of Colette's adolescent heroine in The Complete Adventures of Claudine (The Fiction Factory

for R4, from Wednesday, September 1). Claire Skinner was remarkably suggestive of the girl's manipulative powers as she made eyes at Aimee (Paloma Baeza) and disturbed the lesbian headmistress (Jill Balcon). Directed by Celia de Wolff and adapted by John Peacock, this forthright production disinterred all the subdued sexuality found in many schoolgirl sagas.

The pain of the unspoken in relationships was the agonising theme of Diana Quick's engrossing adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir's novella, The Woman Destroyed (R4, Monday, Septem-ber 6). Quick played the woman who realised too late that being a wife and mother was not enough and that she had been complicit in her husband's (Alex Jennings) adultery.

Chris Thompson's Skeggy (BBC Birmingham for R4, Friday, September 3) linked three couples with a runaway girl (Laura Chambers) who had a cathartic effect on their lives in a well-meaning but over-coincidental piece.

We returned to time travelling with a glorious production of E Nesbitt's The Story of the Amulet (R4, Monday, August 30).

Meanwhile, the familiar collaboration of John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot, Enyd Williams directing and Michael Bakewell dramatising Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (R4, Saturday August 28) is an anarchic form of time travel in its own right.

Man of the moment - John Hegley wrote and acted in The Adventures of John and Tony on Radio 4