Character building | 18 February 2012

He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy of plays for Radio 4, The Interrogation, takes three predictable situations — a Premier League footballer rapes an underage girl, a white woman batters her racist husband to death with a brick, a black kid joins a gang and shoots dead a young mother — and fills in the details behind those black-and-white headlines. It’s not the story outline that matters, but the characterisation, the way the people speak, the language they use. Each of the characters is so clearly differentiated you know exactly what they look like without a detail being given to us.