The joy of radioplays (and the power of voice acting)

I like to go running. And, like any sport, you have to do it a lot to get any benefit from it. So, after a while, my MP3-player started to replay the same old songs I heard numerous times before. But then I discovered audio books and I was merrily on my way again. Getting my health up and 'reading' some literature. Best of both sides.

But recently I fell in love with radio plays.

I was born way after the nineteen fifties. So I never experienced the 'power' of radio plays in an Orson Welles kind of sense. But 'people' still do them to this day. Especially the British Broadcasting Company, or, the BBC.

Good omens

In short the story about Good Omes is pretty much a parody of the movie the Omen. The son of Satan (the anti-Christ) is born. But due to a mislaid baby the boy grows up outside of any nether realm influence. He grows up a normal boy. That is, until his powers start to manifest himself.

I fell in love with radio plays the minute I listened to (one of my favorite books) Good Omens. Apart from hearing the voice of the late Terry Pratchett for the last time it also gave me actors performing individual parts with heart and feeling.

In an (good) audio book (e.g. Lenny Hendry's Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman) the reader performs all the parts with his/her own set of acting skills. But when a male reader is voicing a young girl it still feels off. You want a girl to play the part of the girl. You don't want the same narrator performing all the voices (even though Steven Fry did quite well on the Harry Potter books). And that's where radio plays come into play. Here we actually got actors performing the parts. In Good Omens a (probably lovely) girl played Pepper with the feistiness that her character demanded.

When you look at the behind the scenes pictures, 

BTW,you can easily spot which child is who. 

They are mirror-images of their book selves.

One example of the things I liked most about the radio play of Good Omens was how this young actor chewed all kinds of radio-scenery when he spoke the line "When my friends get here!".

Imagine the scene about a young boy, a normal boy, who suddenly grows into immense power of knowing everything and being able to change everything. There are four horsemen of the apocalypse on their way and he knows it. He knows, deep down inside, that he is about the end the world as we know it.

But he is still a normal boy, sitting with his friends in a quarry, playing around until he grows dark and speaks in childish -yet medieval wicked- manner "When my friends get here!".

His pals (greatly acted as well) are scared sh*tless and me -running along- am too.

It carries a far greater punch when you hear somebody who sounds like the character act a line than when a narrator acts it. This boy nailed it perfectly and all I could do was download another BBC radio play.

Something wicked this way comes and Koudelka

The next was Something Wicked this Way comes and -again- it is far better than the audio book I listened to previously. The opening alone (the first ten minutes) are brilliant in acting and writing. But this also brought back a remembrance about voice acting.

When I was sixteen I played the game Koudelka. This game is set almost a century ago when a group of people break into an old abandoned monastery to find the horrors within.

Now, this isn't the best game in the world (the fighting system pretty much destroyed it), but it did contain -for the first time I ever heard- some of the best voice-acting dealing with serious themes instead of “shoot this!” or “aargh I’m hit!”. Take this scene for instance. The group is resting and...drunk. And the main character Koudelka tells her friend the horrors of her youth (around 9:30).

Truth be told it sounded better (acted) in my memory but still for a game industry than only just started to incorporate human voices in computer games this was a leap. This scene isn't some general shouting to shoot somebody. This scene contains emotions of loss and grief. Those emotions have to be acted.

Now that computer games have better graphics they are more like a cartoon or movie. The voice becomes less important. the (e)motions of the face take the upper hand. So, I argue, in 'ye old days' computer games were more like radio plays than nowadays. But I digress.Anyway, now I downloaded Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' (a great play, just look at the cast!).

The downside of radio plays

Radioplays do have one tremendous downside though. Namely: Action driven sequences. There's a whole phone line chase that takes place in Good Omens that just doesn't work (don't bother me about the details. Listen to the book.). It hardly even works in written form. It would look great on the movie screen, but we're not there yet*. So action - be it the Moby Dick hunt, that messed up freefall jump from Angels and Demons. Action sequences don't work well in radio plays. They work better in written form, audio book form (because the narrator can simply read the lines) or -per above example- videogames. But then we're too close to movie adaptations.

So, to end my rambling I pretty much want to make two points (apart from: When you go out running don't listen to coaches or music; pick a book). First, a book becomes so much better when it is acted out**. When a girl is played by a girl and an old man by and old man. Second, a performance by sound can give quite a punch if it is acted correctly. Sometimes when I'm running and listening to a play I stop and stare into the distance because what I just heard moved me. Made me stop running.

* They\ve been working on a Good Omens adaptation for years now.

** I wanted to mention this point in the article but I decided not to. Yes a radio play is different from a book because it is an adaptation. So you don't hear the exact lines the author has written. In an (unabridged) audio book you will hear each and every line. But I argue that, if you really want to read a book and make it your own by interpreting each and every line and using your own imagination*** , you'd better 'read' the paper. This because a narrator will always (in adversely) steer your interpretation (with, for example, tone of voice or pause).

*** Whenever I read a book my mind is filled with all kinds of creatures to fill the slots of the characters. I remember reading the first Harry Potter novels pre-movies. Harry was portrayed by a boy I knew at school (who was black by the way). Ron was me with red hair (truly blood red). And Hermione was a cartoon girl I once saw on the telly. This changed when the actors where cast.