Do3 - The Carhullan Army

[Guest]

Worth a listen IMO if you missed it last year. Here's the programme info, and the (very brief!) R3 MB thread.

Russ

[DracoM]

The novel is a stunning slow burner. Stay with it as it builds with ever increasing intensity. She is a very fine and deeply underestimated writer Sarah Hall, I mean. .
BUT
yet another NOVEL 'dramatised'. I really am getting fed up with these conversions. They seem to work very rarely particularly in the timescale allowed them by the BBC.

What next - 90 minute 'War and Peace' or 'Middlemarch'?

[Mobson7]

I know nothing of the book but I enjoyed, well, found this play utterly engrossing and have listened to it a few times since...quite frankly with the way things have been at the BBC, being 'fed up' with any play that is being broadcast is treading a very narrow path...perhaps we should be grateful that drama has appeared the survive the cuts in the UK since the World service has cut drama completely, as confirmed by Nick Warburton on R4 m/b's last week. Where in the rest of the world do we get access to radio drama of this quality. So yes, if there is an adaption of the books you mention, which can of course under the R3 remit extend to 135mins, I'll be glad to hear them!

[french frank]

I gave it a miss last time mainly because science fiction holds nil interest for me. I have been introduced to a couple of modern(-ish) novels through Do3, but stick to the view that the play's the thing. Adaptations of new novels suggests a shortage of suitable new drama.

But I agree that we are very lucky to have Do3 - all the more mysterious that R3 doesn't merit a single Sony nomination this year, while R4 has four of the five. Drama is one of the few areas where one would have thought R3 could compete on the same playing field.

[DracoM]

< can of course under the R3 remit extend to 135mins >

Yes, indeed, and a tiny part of me murmurs 'if only'. Most frequently, the BBC seems to assume that 90 minutes is the very outer edge of what the R3 listener can concentrate for.

In place of intellectual challenge, time for reflection and evaluation, sheer paranoid terror of losing listeners seems to underpin pretty well every bit of the scheduling we hear on R3 these days. Keep the pieces short, vary the diet with startling juxta-positions, the chat bubbling and relentless, lace with emails, tweets, and endless trails, learn the lessons of R1 and CFM, because the cardinal sin is - "don't let them swtich off, grip, grab, engage, lock them in, because no-one these days has a concentration span of more than 45 minutes and at a real stretch one hour and if you really, really must, we can go to 90 minutes - VERY occasionally, like once a week if you're lucky." I often wonder if this is maybe more a reflection on the concentration span of the production team than the listeners.

My problem with novel adaptations is that of their nature, novels more often than not - particularly those pre-20th cent - depend on blocks of prose that contextualise, give mood and argument even dialectic to a big architecture. Their chosen mode is not often predominantly dialogue, and as we have seen over the last three weeks or so on Do3, long blocks of voice-over, or narration can indeed become tedious. Radio drama's chosen mode IS largely dialogue, and extended narration falls between two stools for me - too long, too lacking in the capacity to contextualise/carry the argument. Of course, skilled adaptors can navigate their ways through, but you run the big risk of losing the essential 'inner voice' of novels. Shakespeare developed the soliloquy to illuminate exactly that area, but by and large, novels don't go in for that mode. IMO, the wordier, the more poetic, the more psycologically complex a novel, the less easily it sits with radio adaptation.

Yes, I do well know that that is / can be limiting in terms of scheduling, and of course there is a place for their transmisison via R3, BUT given the richness of world drama, it does seem just a tad perverse to follow novel after novel after novel in the platform's only extended drama slot.

[french frank]

My problem with novel adaptations is that of their nature, novels more often than not - particularly those pre-20th cent - depend on blocks of prose that contextualise, give mood and argument even dialectic to a big architecture. Their chosen mode is not often predominantly dialogue, and as we have seen over the last three weeks or so on Do3, long blocks of voice-over, or narration can indeed become tedious. Radio drama's chosen mode IS largely dialogue, and extended narration falls between two stools for me - too long, too lacking in the capacity to contextualise/carry the argument.

The Eldridge play was written as a radio play, and was based on a single narrative voice which, for me, didn't help. I can see that radio playwrights could think it was 'suitable' for radio, whereas they couldn't get away with it on stage.

I judge (well, partly ) a modern novel by how much dialogue there is on the page. If there's lots I don't bother with it

[Russ]

Apropos of nothing really, but with Anne-Marie Duff starring in The Carhullan Army and Do3's recent propensity for grabbing recent stage plays with their original casts (Spring Storm, The Chalk Garden), I wouldn’t be surprised if R3 didn't try to get Rattigan's Cause Celebre, in which she also stars, which opened recently at the Old Vic, and as covered by last night's Review Show. Cause Celebre is not regarded as Rattigan's best (I've never seen or heard it) but was apparently written as a radio play originally (transmitted in May 1981, I note, from the trusty suttonelms) site, so that could be interesting. Not that I'm a huge Rattigan fan, but…

Russ

[Pipisme]

I heard The Carhullan Army when it was broadcast a year ago and found it engrossing and very disturbing.

[french frank]

Strongish stuff (makes the Wuthering Heights language sound pretty tame). I'm not sure that I quite followed all the action - the two main scenarios had a similar savagery in the exchanges and I probably wasn't always mentally in the right one.

I thought it was well performed and it's probably as close as I'll get to reading the book as I'm not too keen on futuristic themes. From that point of view is was good as I got an overview in only 90 minutes ...

[Eudaimonia]

On the whole, I thought it was engaging and well-written. Nevertheless, I was a little chagrined at how much the author seemed to want to épater les bourgeois by trotting out all the cliches related to "wise and radical freedom-loving dykes"... at times, it verged on the truly cornball. I mean, the only things missing were references to veganism and a bunch of cats running around.

Oh well, call me PC or hypersensitive or whatever, but I would have preferred the stereotypes to be dialed back a notch. And I do pity anyone who had to endure listening to it within earshot of a conservative!

[DracoM]

The book does NOT do that. As well as gritty sisterhood, there is repression, conflict, skirmishes of all kinds, idealism, disilluisonment, regrets as well as flag waving - i.e. prety much the spectrum of most human societies.

You see, this is why such adaptations are mere Reader's Digest insights? It's a far finer, more nuanced book than a 90 minute play can give it out.

Technical problem was having a number of female voices that on air sounded just a touch too similar to make following lives easy. Which of course a book does not do!

I am delighted for Sarah Hall that her fine novel makes it to R3 even if in this valiant by imperfect mode.

[french frank]

It didn't strike me as being primarily a feminist play/novel at all, in the sense that the message was feminist. It did deal with feminist issues in the sense that they affected women and not men (and could be more uncomfortable for men, and therefore powerfully put). It's only now that Euda has mentioned the concept of 'PC' that this occurs to me that it could be read as a sort of feminist protest. The viewpoint of women is one way of depicting a vicious totalitatarian regime but, to me, the women aren't depicted completely sympathetically enough to make their choices and way of life seem valid.

[DracoM]

Exactly. It is multi-faceted as a book and not quite the proselytising document some are claiming. Interesting that Sarah Hal;l herselkf was instrumental in the adaptation.

Given its location, I was sad that there were so few genuine Cumbrian acccents: generic 'BBC actor's north' kept reminding me of Corrie I fear.

[french frank]

'Pologies for my rather poorly expressed post (above - or below). I think what I was trying to say is almost clear

[Eudaimonia]

It's only now that Euda has mentioned the concept of 'PC' that this occurs to me that it could be read as a sort of feminist protest. .

True, but when you mix the shock value of "gritty realism" with lesbian cliches and stereotypes--and characters lose much of their nuanced complexity due to time constraints--you risk veering uncomfortably toward sensationalism and objectification. The whole idea of a "Fierce Sisterhood of Mythical Warrior Women of the North" who dare to take on the patriarchy, are fertile and, quote, "sticky" and rough men up and have their way with them...ugh, embarrassing. That sex scene was straight out of 1950s fetish pulp.

Oh well, I'm sure I'm just being touchy. Onward to next week!

Cheers, ~E.