Music can capture emotions and images. It can swing you instantaneously from one mood to another. It can – as subtly as a raised eyebrow – give to a phrase an extra, and possibly contradictory, level of meaning. It can provide unity, where unity might otherwise be difficult to achieve. Simple counterpoint, perhaps using one instrument, like the zither in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, can be very effective.
(THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF CÉSAR FRANCK’S PIANO QUINTET. AFTER 15 SECONDS FADE AND KEEP UNDER HIS MONOLOGUE)
CESAR:
Oh my soul! My love!
Only in music shall I reach out to you.
Only in music shall we become as one.
We shall identify, conjoin, like light from the far stars, shining, enduring, as long as music itself.
My soul, my love, my Augusta!
ANNOUNCER:
Karen Armstrong in the introduction to The Case for God writes:
“Music is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts and skins and reaches resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness. But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words.” (See below for more about this book.)
(HEAVY MOTORWAY TRAFFIC, POWERFUL RADIOPHONIC MUSIC)
MADGE:
The future. All the world is in flight. We’ve climbed aboard buses, cars, lorries, anything with an internal combustion engine and taken flight from London.
ANNOUNCER:
We present “Hot Rubber or Death on the Motorway” a play for radio by John Fletcher. The year 2025, the setting the twenty-lane relief sub-orbital motorway of the ten-lane relief sub-orbital motorway of the M25. Our heroine: Madge. She’s rough, she’s tough, she’s behind the wheel.
MADGE:
On. On and on, rubber on concrete, rubber on asphalt, keep those arms out stretched, gripping the wheel, on and on. Never slow down.
GEORGE:
(AT DISTANCE) Mum.
MADGE:
(DOESN’T HEAR HIM) They shall not go faster than me, not one juggernaut or mobile home or mechanized leviathan shall go faster than me. At the same time I shall go no faster than them. Not one whit.
GEORGE:
Mum.
MADGE:
(SHE STILL DOES NOT HEAR HIM) Round London and round. A forty-lane motorway, the traffic streaming on perpetually, eternally like great herds of bison across the North American plains.
GEORGE:
MUM !
MADGE:
GEORGE:
MADGE:
GEORGE:
MADGE:
MADGE:
GEORGE:
MADGE:
GEORGE:
We recommend the following radio scripts. Some may be ordered from Amazon.co.uk :
We also recommend the following radio scripts: Polaris by Fay Weldon in Best Radio Plays of 1978, I Never Killed My German and Of the Levitation at St Michael’s by Carey Harrison in A Suffolk Trilogy, The Village Fete by Peter Tinniswood in Best Radio Plays of 1987, Cigarettes and Chocolate by Anthony Minghella in Best Radio Plays of 1988, Death and the Tango by John Fletcher and Song of the Forest by Tina Pepler in Best Radio Plays of 1990 and In the Native State by Tom Stoppard in Best Radio Plays of 1991.
Sadly some of these scripts are out of print. However you should be able to order them from your local library
We also recommend the recording of Lee Hall’s wonderful first radio play, I Luv U Jimmy Spud. Lee went on to write the screenplay of Billy Elliot.