In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and Kim Kardashian — is held up as proof of the complacency of the radio establishment. Freed from the constraints of box-ticking commissioners, wily podcasters have been able to steal a march on Broadcasting House by giving audiences what they actually want.
Or so runs the theory. But I can’t help thinking there’s one large slice of legacy radio territory the podcasters haven’t taken yet. And that’s the good old-fashioned audio drama. Not the most fashionable genre right now admittedly, but an important one nonetheless. Few 20th-century broadcasts, after all, are considered more iconic than Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds.
When I heard the news that Playwrights Horizons — the trendy fringe theatre in New York — was entering the podcast market, I figured the game might finally be on. Could these prize dramatists revive the beleaguered radio play, in the same way that Davids Chase and Simon revolutionised television serials in the 1990s and early 2000s? I was hopeful.
Listeners had to team up with a friend, and relay their lines – out loud – to each other
Yet six instalments into Soundstage — a ‘biweekly anthology’ of ‘scripted fiction’ — I’m starting to worry that my initial excitement might have been premature. It isn’t that the writing itself is bad; most of the scripts are at least halfway decent. The problem is that, instead of trying to make decent drama, Playwrights Horizons has set out to subvert the format entirely. And with predictably mixed results.
As you might have gathered from the name, the playwrights have been told to focus their creative energies exploring sound itself, yet much of this assumes that most listeners will be using headphones.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in