Death and the Tango by John Fletcher

Death and the Tango
by
John Fletcher

I know nothing about John Fletcher, but I wish I did. This play was broadcast on the BBC about twenty years ago. All I know about Fletcher is that he seems to have amassed an impressive body of radio work, in a variety of genres. I was going to start off the blog by posting Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution but then I had the craving to re-listen to Death and the Tango. It's one of my favorite radio plays, a strange, surreal combination of comedy and drama and metaphysics. And tango. It won a Giles Cooper Award in 1990.

There are many remarkable aspects to the play. I love its scope. Death and the Tango travels from Birmingham to sweepingly epic vistas, all within the space of less than two hours. The visual backdrop is remarkable, but it is also grounded in a basic sense of drama. The two main characters interact with each other in an ebb and flow of dramatic tension, growing and changing in response to their new circumstances and decisions. It's a great example of how, through character and arc, even the most abstract and bizarre story can ground itself in a satisfying emotional reality.

The landscape is alien, but the people and their desires are accessible and captivating. It is a story of obsession and search for meaning, and there is nothing else like it in the world. I particularly love the imagery of the ocean liner, and the transformation that the female character undergoes near the end – it is strikingly visual, but that imagery is fundamentally tied to her dramatic arc. I hope you enjoy this as much as I have. Special thanks to the original poster at radioarchive. That community is perhaps the greatest and most useful thing that has happened to audio drama, and I urge you to support them.

Download Death and the Tango Here

Audio Drama in Cyberspace

These days, the internet is the most essential means of distributing audio drama. And that’s great – it’s cheap and cost effective, it can integrate the audio with text and information providing background and additional context for the production. But something else happens when people distribute audio drama on the internet. They create confusion.

As my earlier post discussed, audio drama is ephemeral. By its very nature it doesn’t have a physical body to inhabit. It’s like a weird alien ghost, roaming the galaxy in search of a mind to take over. So when people present audio drama online, they need to do so in a way that allows that weird alien ghost to beam into people’s brains in the most efficient way possible. And stick.

Here are the big problems that I’ve noticed in regards to web design:

1. Graphic diarrhea
2. Lack of context
3. Lack of related visual imagery
4. Lack of curator or social component

I’ve already talked about how relating specific visual images to specific radio plays can enhance the social transmissibility of the work (is that even a word?), in the way that album covers do with music, so I won’t rehash that. But let’s take the others one by one.

Graphic Design.

Web designers are sometimes like movie producers. They think that the biggest explosion is more appealing, and the coolest graphics make their work seem better, more cutting edge, and more successful. The more an element of design exists for its own sake, the less useful it is. And, as you can see with movies, the more dated it seems. You can pretty much tell when a movie or TV show was made by what the motion graphics look like. Except for some stuff. The credits in Woody Allen movies, for example, are simple white text on a black background and make it impossible to date his films in this way. And that’s a good thing, for the most part. You want the design to convey information, and then get out of the way. You don’t want the delivery vehicle to detract from the content it is supposed to deliver. If the ice cream truck is better than the ice cream it sells, you have a problem.

When it comes to audio drama, simpler is always better. And the way you list things can impact the way people feel about stuff. For example, a simple text-based, numbered list of radio plays has a way of encouraging an audience to listen to them all, in a certain order. People are natural collectors, especially nerds like me. We want to listen to all the episodes and then geek out about them with other people. Being able to see where all the episodes are, in one place, makes that easier to do.

You’ve probably come across the same problem that I have. You hear a snippet of something on the radio, but miss the whole story. So you go to NPR’s website or wherever, and search for the whole show. You will probably find what you are looking for, but the hunt will include a long trek through various pop-down menus, sidebars, and lots of excess information. What you really need is just a plain list. But like most people, web designers want to impress the people they work for. And the way to impress someone is, as you have probably experienced, not doing something in the most efficient way possible, but making it seem like you exerted a lot of time and effort.

Simplifying the presentation of an audio drama to an uncluttered, sparse layout, and grouping pertinent information in ways that encourage further participation can go a long way to making content more accessible. And don’t forget to link your credit list and descriptions link to other related content. If you are looking at a blurb about a radio play, you should be able to click on the writer’s name and find other stuff by the writer. The same with the actors and producers. That’s called context.

Context

There are some good blogs and web sites and online resources out there for audio drama. But most of them do not provide enough context for deciding whether to listen to something or not. Most people have a finite amount of time, and want to maximize their usage of it to some degree. Therefore, giving people a bit of extra information can help make up their minds. The most important thing besides listing the title of an audio play is listing the author. Radio is a writer’s medium. The writer, more than live theater, has the most primacy when it comes to meaning and intention. So put the writer’s name up on the same line of text as the title of the piece. If it’s a serial with multiple writers, you get a pass. Maybe. But writers are good indicators of quality. If I listen to an audio play by John Fletcher, such as Death and the Tango, then I might want to hear more work by Fletcher. And if I come across another one of his plays, I’m more likely to stop and listen. Good writers, even ones who span genre and style in the way that Fletcher does, are brands. They help signify that something is more likely to be good. And the more brands there are out there with a reputation for excellence, the healthier the audience will be.

Likewise, giving other information about an audio production is helpful. I have to be honest here. Although I am based in the United States, I think a lot of audio drama in the U.S. is just plain terrible. If I have a choice between an amateur audio play from Wisconsin and something that was written and produced for the BBC by professional radio stalwarts, I’m going to choose the BBC play. And if you give the information about who is producing an audio play, where they are from, who is acting in it, etc, that gives me more information to make an educated guess about what to listen to. And what about the genre? I don’t like historical fiction. I love satire. Let me know which audio play is which! There’s a lot of content out there, and I want to listen to the good stuff. So how can I find out what the good stuff is, without information? Someone has to act as a curator.

There are two ways of discerning good content – the elitist route and the populist route. Both are useful, and both need to be implemented in audio drama to help direct people to the best product. The elitist route is when someone hand-picks content that’s good and content that’s bad, and talks about it. They make lists and recommendations; they tell me what to miss, and what not to. They have opinions that I can try out and see if they reflect my own. They are critics and curators. They also might act as interpreter for a work that is complex and that I might not understand. But if someone explains to me what they’re hearing in it, I might appreciate it after all.

The other route is the populist route – what’s more popular? There are different ways of assessing this, but the main thing is that everyone who’s out there listening should be able to weigh in. Rating things like amazon.com or goodreads.com is a great way of aggregating opinions. And those opinions are usually very reliable. They don’t necessarily tell you if you will like something or not, but they will tell you why people generally like or dislike something. Weighing those opinions against your own is a useful tool for making decisions about what to listen to.

Allowing users to rate things goes hand in hand with another important aspect – socializing. If people can rate and write reviews themselves, then they can also comment on other peoples’ reviews and share ratings and spread information and opinions through their social networks. And more than anything else, having a group of friends who listen to audio drama and discuss it is the most critical way of building a healthy community and a prosperous art form. Building socializing opportunities within content-delivering webspace is vital to making the medium more popular. And remember – we want audio drama to be more popular and more visible and prosperous for a very good reason. Because if we can make that happen, we get more content, better content, and a more secure future for a medium that we love. And the world might be better off as well, in some vague hippy-dippy way. Awww.

All of this stuff is pretty basic, but it’s not being applied to audio drama the way it is being applied to music or TV shows. I’ll be talking about several specific examples in the future. To kick-start the discussion, check out Big Finish’s website. They’re the company that does the Doctor Who audio series. And their web site is terrible, it’s like they’re shooting themselves in the foot. In fact, it was so bad that I said so to Jason Haigh-Ellery at a Doctor Who convention. More on that later.

Making Audio Drama Visible

Audio drama is by nature an ephemeral medium. Radio broadcasts are even moreso. Because of a lack of physical presence in peoples’ lives, it is difficult to share it with others. One of the greatest mistakes that audio drama producers have made over the years is underestimating the importance of the way in which people socialize with audio drama. It’s an individual experience. That’s not a bad thing, in fact, it’s something that makes the medium so special. It is very intimate and individualized. But it’s hard to transmit that to other people. And it’s difficult to see audio drama. Not in the sense that it’s difficult to look at. I mean in the sense that it is difficult to see that audio drama is happening in the world.

Every other art form is tied in some way to a physical object or a visual image. Whether a book, a DVD, a CD, a painting, or even the face of an actor staring out into a darkened theater. These things embody the medium they represent with physical presence. They make themselves known in ways that are particularly memorable and easy to access and transmit. You can pass that book on to another person, lend somebody your CD, or talk about a painting or a theater play while conjuring up the mental image of the experience. It’s an essential way of reminding yourself about it or focusing your thoughts. Try talking about an audio play. You can do it, but it’s harder. Try sharing a scene from an audio play – it’s difficult. Out of context, it’s almost impossible. If it’s a radio broadcast, it’s physically impossible.

If you wanted to show somebody a favorite scene from a movie, for example, you can pop in the DVD and search the chapter headings. You don’t even need to recall where the scene occurs in the movie. Or, better yet, just search youtube and you’ll probably find the clip you are looking for, along with a bunch of user comments. And if you want to engage in a discussion about it, or express your approval or disapproval, youtube can accommodate that as well. And you can share it with every person out there on the internet.

So what do we do?

Well, to start, we can pay attention to how people interact with audio drama more carefully. We can provide information and context to help people know who is producing the content, who is writing, who is acting, etc – and in so doing, can allow people to develop their likes and dislikes. We can engage the social aspects of sharing media more aggressively. That’s the big one. More on that later.

There are also opportunities to make audio drama more visible, more physically present. I don’t mean we should start illustrating audio plays. That would be terrible. But we could use visual images to help present the plays to people. It would probably be best to use non-literal images, so as to not encroach on the author’s intention or on the visual imagery that the individual creates for themselves. But basic graphic images can do wonders. Judging books by their covers is actually an extraordinarily effective way of choosing literature. A book cover provides one with all sorts of useful information, even though most books are not, by their nature, creatures of vision. An audio play could benefit greatly from having a graphic image that is akin to a book or album cover. This would do two things: 1) it would be easier to market the product and 2) it would be easier to talk about. Those visual cues are very useful when remembering things, and if it’s easy to remember, it’s easier to discuss with others, and therefore easier to spread amongst people you talk to.

Theater plays have a similar type of problem. They also exist in an ephemeral way. You can go to a play and consume it. But you can’t take a piece of it home in your pocket. And you can’t even buy a copy of the play. You can probably purchase a script at some point, or maybe even a video of the event. But neither one of those things are the actual play itself, because the play is exclusively the thing that happens live in a theater before the eyes of an audience. And yet, when one goes to New York for example, plays are visually present everywhere. All of the big Broadway productions have arresting graphic icons that proclaim their presence. Like the mask from Phantom of the Opera, the eyes of Cats, or that Betty Boop girl from Les Miserables. It’s easy to see that plays are happening in the world, even if we can’t actually see or experience the play at that particular moment. Broadway plays often have merchandise that people can buy and give to people. They even have a Playbill that you can keep as a souvenir without buying anything.

But it’s not enough to make audio drama visually present in physical space. It is essential, if not even more important, to make audio drama visual in cyberspace, too. The way that audio is presented online is abysmal. I’m sorry, but it just plain sucks.

To be continued!

The Four Big Problems

There are four major problems facing audio drama that I’ve come up with so far: Definition, Knowledge, Availability, and Visibility.

1. People have no idea what audio drama is. Or they think it’s Old Time Radio, something cheesy and archaic, and not something subtle and vibrant and contemporary.
2. There is no central depository for knowledge about audio drama. There isn’t a place for all the disparate enthusiasts around the world to collect the knowledge and data they have acquired into one place. Yet. The best way to do this is with a wiki.
3. There is no central clearinghouse for distributing audio drama, particularly the BBC output. We can’t just have knowledge about the body of work – we need to be able to listen to it.
4. Audio drama is not visible.

This last issue is actually the most important.

Elissa S. Guralnick and Medium Specificity

Sight Unseen

by

Elissa S. Guralnick

One of the first things any artistic medium needs to do to be legitimate is to define itself. What makes film, for example, a discrete form of art, and not just a recorded form of theater? Many people have poured lots of thought into that question, and since the dawn of cinema that question has been argued and debated in many different places.

I think it’s fair to say that audio drama is not quite as popular as cinema. Did radio ever have the level of debate and critical analysis that cinema did? I suspect probably not, but there are people out there who have written about such things. There are early media theorists who discussed radio. Broadcast media have had more discussion, but that’s not what we’re really concerned with here. An audio drama does not have to ever be broadcast over a radio wave. Indeed, more audio content than ever is transmitted directly to listeners over the internet. Tim Crook’s book includes discussion of media theory regarding radio drama. It’s a good book, I recommend it. It’s got a bit of everything.

The most important book for discussing audio drama is Sight Unseen by Elissa S. Guralnick. She’s a professor somewhere out west, I believe. Published in 1995, you can still find copies around, and I highly recommend it. It is a critical analysis of modern radio drama, including works by Pinter, Beckett, Stoppard, and others. It is also a very passionate argument for medium specificity. Guralnick makes the case that radio drama is not just a form of theater, but is a fully fledged art form of its own, with unique properties and characteristics that are specific to audio drama, the medium’s own super powers, as it were. The only difficulty is that many of the plays she talks about are difficult to find. Most are from the BBC, which airs things and then sticks them in the vault and sits on them forever and they never see the light of day again. Here’s a list of the plays you need to listen to or read the scripts of:

1. Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker
2. Artist Descending a Staircase by Tom Stoppard
3. The Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett
4. Transfigured Night by Robert Ferguson
5. Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin by David Rudkin
6. Roratorio by John Cage
7. Wings by Arthur Kopit
8. A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter
9. The Bagman by John Arden
10. Pearl by John Arden

If you are interested in reading this book and want to get ahold of these plays, stay tuned. There might be some options for you in future posts. Also, if you have a copy of Cries from Casement or Transfigured Night – PLEASE let me know. They are almost impossible to find anywhere, have never been commercially released, and probably never will be.

Welcome

I recently attended a symposium in New York City on the future of radio drama. During the panel discussion, Arthur Yorinks made some great points on the difficulty of propelling the medium into the future. The very term "radio drama" is so loaded with negative stereotypes that it becomes a burden, he said.

A new term needs to be created, because as soon as the term "radio drama" is mentioned, it conjures up thoughts of Old Time Radio, of cheesy crime serials and limpid sitcoms. Or of The War of the Worlds. It is so ingrained in American consciousness that radio drama is a thing of the past, a quaint old timey thing that has no place in modern artistic or commerical worlds.

That is not what radio drama is.

I would like to start the discussion off with asking for new terminology. What shall we call this thing that we love, these plays of sound and voice? Going forward, I am going to try to use the term "audio drama."

In the next several weeks, I am going to write a few more posts about theoretical stuff. Observations, theories, general food for thought about the subject. I am also going to begin, shortly, to post audio plays for people to listen to. The plays that I will post are hard to find and unavailable commercially, as is most modern audio drama. This blog is for educational purposes. The goal is to explore what modern audio drama has to offer, and to try to correct the weird ruts that the medium has fallen into. There are several ways to do this. I am also going to try to use these posts to generate a manifesto of sorts, a simple document that will, theoretically, provide a loose framework for identifying a) what audio drama IS, b) how we can make it better and c) how we can reach a wider audience.

Please feel free to comment and add to the discussion. Thanks for reading this.

Welcome to the world of modern audio drama!