As the ravens circle around Broadcasting House in London’s West End, presaging difficult times ahead for BBC Radio, with less money to play with at a time of increased competition from its commercial rivals, a very different kind of listening experience was on offer last week in an upstairs room above a café in Canterbury. The UK International Radio Drama Festival is in its fifth year, gathering dramas from across Europe and beyond for a week of intense and unusual audio, transmitted in 18 different languages. Thirty or so of us sat around as the plays were broadcast through a number of old-fashioned radio sets, listening to monologues, musicals, character studies, experimental sound art in Czech, German, Farsi, Spanish, Slovene, Serbian, Romanian, Russian and more.
How on earth can you follow what’s going on when you can’t possibly know what anyone is saying? Remarkably well: each play has an English translation which you can read word-for-word as the drama unfolds. But in any case the fact that you can’t understand what’s being said hardly seems to matter. It’s the rhythm of the words that draws you in and keeps your interest, the pacing, the tone, the cadences, and whether there’s enough variety of voices between all the actors (crucial to the success of any play). It’s also down to the sound world created by the technicians in the studio: is it hollow or warm, aurally offputting or compelling?
To find yourself in a roomful of strangers listening to a play in a language so foreign you can’t even recognise the individual words is a weirdly engaging experience. If the play’s any good — the script, the acting and the recording — it will reach out and draw you in, holding your attention.
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