Not a Love Story

After being violently raped by someone she thought was a friend, Maddy is urged by the police to go public and prosecute her attacker, with very mixed results.

LISTEN HERE, until Sunday 20th May.

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I listened to this sometime predictable, often harrowing, account over the course of last week – despite the fact that I was often in serious danger of crying at my desk. From the recognisable and lighthearted beginning that quickly turns sinister and shocking, through the breakdown of friendships, relationships and family ties, to the final 15 minutes in the courtroom and the verdict (Not Guilty), I was hooked and compelled to continue listening.

Part of the reason I felt as though I couldn’t stop listening was the detail included in this play, and its desire to “kill the darlings” throughout. The rape takes place within the first five minutes of the first episode, in somewhat horrific detail, and in the fourth instalment Maddy describes to her boyfriend in a monotone that tells of her boredom of recounting the sordid tale exactly what happened to her. We are not given metaphors or cut-scenes, everything is told on-stage and directly to us, whether or not we feel ready to hear it. The detail and avoidance of shying away from the detail is sickening, but I appreciated the honesty with which this was told. There are a number of lines and scenes that brought home the brutality of the whole event, and just how atypical everyone’s reaction is when faced with such a sudden and life-changing event.

It is this compulsion to turn to the worst possible scenario that makes the story a little unbelievable, however. Maddy’s horrific attack not being enough; her friends turn against her as they believe that she is lying about the extent of the violence/consensual nature of the sex, her boyfriend dumps her once he hears the details of the rape, her father questions her willingness to sleep with her attacker and then turns to alcohol, her rapist fabricates a story about their imagined ‘sex life’ and journalists turn on her, suggesting too that she is a liar and deserves everything she gets. The number of Things Gone Wrong with this story are, I think, a little too high to be believable, but I’m willing to forgive that as I feel that this play stood as a metaphor for the theme of rape culture rather than a story of one girl’s impossible situation. Every possible viewpoint on Maddy’s rape, and a number of similar experiences, are represented in some way and to work all of this into 15-minute chunks is certainly a feat – and in this case one which has been completed successfully.

In spite of some clumsy and obvious dialogue, there were some truly poignant scenes in this drama, and while the characters are sometimes quite clearly vehicles for rape culture viewpoints it is hard not to find an opinion that challenges. I think it’s definitely worth a listen, even if you think you know what your opinions are, as there’ll be sure to be something that sticks in the mind. Finally, kudos to R4 Woman’s Hour for not turning away from something so divisive, and instead using their 15-Minute Drama vehicle for something so radically different.

Related articles

• Radioplay Review: Bad Memories (postgradpanopticon.wordpress.com)

In 2004, a successful architect and his family mysteriously disappear from their home. Six years later five bodies are found in the cellar of their house. They are identified as Jonathan and Imogen Blake and their son, Matthew; Philip Gibson, who was on the missing person’s register and a woman, identity unknown. Forensics determine that not only were they murdered, but the time of death was1926. Can audio files found with the bodies solve the mystery?

Cast: Rachel Weir ….. Nicola Walker Jim Marquez ….. Rupert Graves Phillip Gibson ….. Steven Mackintosh Jonathan Blake ….. Anthony Calf Imogen Blake ….. Jana Carpenter Matthew Blake ….. Oscar Richardson Mary Marston ….. Imogen MCCurdy Boy 1 …… Ashley Cook Boy 2 …… Marcus Webb

Written and directed by Julian Simpson.

Recorded by Lucinda Mason Brown and David Chilton at Stanmer House in Brighton. Sound design by David Chilton

Producer: Karen Rose A Sweet Talk Production for BBC Radio 4.

• Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 9:00PM Fri, 27 Apr 2012

Bad Memories is a typical ‘family home gone wrong’ ghost story, in which a small family with a young child move into a haunted house and, as expected, are haunted and then worse. After calling in a paranormal investigator, Philip Gibson, who records the murderous ghost-girl to verify her presence but in doing so antagonises her. She ups the ante, asking the young boy Matthew to join her – “come and play”. But when he and his family attempt to escape, they are murdered by the ghost who seems to have supernatural control over the house; creating doors where they no longer exist and luring the family and Gibson into a room from her past in order to kill them. Their bodies, and that of an unidentified woman, are accidentally and literally stumbled upon by two students exploring the spooky house, and police investigators then find Gibsons recordings under the – seemingly 100 year-old – bodies.

There is much to confuse and intrigue here, and the paradox between the modern tape and family disappearance and the old bodies murdered in the same way as 1926 police reports suggest, is primary among them. Time travel, murder and ghosts are an exciting combination, and the discussion between the police officer Jim Marquez and the sound specialist Rachel Weir piques interest and foreshadows something more than a simple murder enquiry from the very beginning.

The difference here is in the telling. Ghost stories are at their most spooky when told at a remove: a third party stumbles upon the key to the puzzle and the reader/audience find out as the third party do that there is something more than just an old house the deal with. Here we have three stories, all unfolding at once, and there are a number of questions for the audience to work out: who is the girl? what happened in the house? and how is time travel involved?

The sound production is excellent here, painting in sound what would be easily achieved by images in a television drama, but in a less sophisticated way. Creepy young girls sing, there is giggling in empty corridors and the young boy Matthew is terrorised by something which cannot be heard by any of the adults but which we the audience can hear via Gibson’s tape. All in all, the excellent use of sound means that the story is prolonged, all the time heightening the audience’s sense that all is not as it seems. Also, the ending and its lack of sound equally speak volumes as this time it is we the audience who are left in the dark.

In summary, I found this play haunting, yet predictable. Although the telling was original, unfortunately the story was not. The sound engineer who cannot get the mystery out of her head goes back to the house at the end – and while it was a nice touch that she could well be the fifth unidentified female body, I knew what was going to happen to her. A severe case of have-you-not-read-this-story-before, that spoiled what was otherwise a spooky tale and turned it into something of an anti-climax.

I’ve found that listening to radio plays while working is very therapeutic, and I’m considering downloading e-books so I can claim to have ‘read’ the classics while I count things and email things and scan things and deal with enquiries that allow me to listen to something in the background.

Another thing I’ve been meaning to do is mention this,and possibly mention some of those radio plays that I’ve enjoyed – but because I’m lazy the first thing I did was to google reviews. I was very surprised to find only one site that reviewed the plays I’d been listening to (if at all!), but on the plus side it’s a really good site! http://www.radiodramareviews.com/index.html has been interesting,  but I’ve been lacking the ability to make my own comments.

So what I’m proposing now – now that I’ve just about finished my first year of Library School – is to collect my opinions on these plays I keep on listening to, and work out what I like and what I don’t. This is a selfish project, but I’m hoping that there’s others out there who will find it interesting. Another thing I’d like to do one day is write a radio play, and so I’m pretty sure that much like studying and reading books so as to improve writing them, listening to and thinking about radio plays will help me to work out what on earth I should be doing in future to write a decent one that can be broadcast on Radio 4!

Expect thoughts and review soon! Watch this (previously unoccupied) space!

In the meantime, the reasons I’ve been quiet: essays and holidays!

Bulb fields and Windmills

My boyfriend is a plant nerd horticulturalist, and so our trip to Holland was filled with bulb fields and horticultural shows and my insistence that if I lived in such a flat place as Holland I would cycle everywhere and it would always be very pretty and isn’t that a good idea – maybe I should move.

The best idea.

We did perhaps slightly too much travelling for a short period of time (I am a lazy soul, after all), but we did see a number of very beautiful things.

“Flying Dutchman”

And this totally boiled off in the thermal spa we visited

And as such, I will be participating in NaPoWriMo. After last year’s NaNoWriMo defeat (acknowledged and decided upon to make myself feel better) I vowed to participate in NaPoWriMo this coming month instead.

Why?

I’ve always considered myself to be more a poet than a fiction-writer. The reasons for this are probably more complicated then I have yet realised, but when asked I tell people it’s because I don’t have the intellectual capacity nor grand ideas to Write A Novel.
This may be true.
What is also true is that I like poetry. I like taking little wordy snapshots of what I see and/or feel or what I make up for others (often fictional) to see and/or feel. I like to play around with words and shapes, and sometimes sounds, in a way that fiction can let you, but which my brand of fiction doesn’t. I want to be self-indulgent, and with poetry I feel that I can do just that. And I don’t even care whether it’s read or liked! Fiction wants readers to inhabit and get lost in its world, poetry stands alone and asks you questions. I like that.

In addition to NaPoWriMo, April is also the month of Finishing LIS Assignments and Going on Holiday – so I picked a good time to write a poem every single day. However, I guess that’s the aim of the thing: overcome adversity and keep swimming.

So, if you’re so inclined, please do check back over April where I will hopefully be posting the products of my NaPoWriMo challenge every day. (Apart from the last week, during which I will be abroad. I’m telling you now so you know I’m not cheating.)

Looking forward to a busy April!

Planners scare me. Big Planners intimidate me. Isn’t it enough to know what I’m doing for the next four years?! (Kind of no choice and all, unless I quit the MSc, but you know…) And in the next four years, I don’t think I will be travelling the world and changing it for everyone. So then, I’ll be 20-something-else – and is that too late?

I’m going to guess right now that the answer to that is ‘no’. And that it’s the attitude that makes the difference. My ‘little’ dreams will keep me happy and I still have time to find a really, really BIG one.

Having said that, I have a feeling that my real big dream wouldn’t be to go everywhere and change everything, but stay in my head and make something really awesome that goes out there and does it for me.

The first time I had this panic, I made a little list of Things I’d Like to Do. I’m going to share what I have of a List so far. No laughing!

• Visit Japan (Tokyo, Sakura festival), and improve Japanese
• Poetry collection published by Faber
• Ice skating
• Burlesque dancing
• Visiting Peru
• Learning Hindi, visiting Fiji
• Radio 4 Radioplay
• Finish Ulysses
• Space flight
• King’s Medical Humanities MA
• Living by the sea
• Novel??

Once I hit ‘publish’ then the list is real and everyone can laugh, I mean, share their own stupid ideas…

So, yeah – any Plans, Big or Small? Or Ridiculous? Oh, and feel free to yell at me for suggesting that size is important.

Spring. March.

Life awakens, relinquishing secure dormancy
to become ephemeral and sudden in the quickening heat.
Wings uncurl, words return, birds soar
above the reflective pool, bodies creating waves
when they return
- briefly-
to the surface, to land.

During Winter
the ripples still form,
spreading wide across the water,
searching for the source.

For a long while, when I was much younger I hasten to add, all I wrote about was him: how he made me feel, what he was like, where we were going etc etc. and if I had stopped writing when we broke up, surely I wasn’t really Writing anyway, I was just being indulgent.

In the two years since realising this, I’ve written on and off, and started this blog as an attempt to get used to writing and sharing writing again. I thought that with an audience I might want to write more, and differently, and that mythical ‘inspiration’ might strike and make me into a Poet at any given moment and that you would all be pleased for me.

As you can see, it hasn’t really gone that way. However, today I think I have learned something about Myself as a Writer – and something about what that means.

I took an hour out from my sick bed this afternoon (once I stopped wondering if I was going to throw up every 20 minutes) and walked around the nature reserve across the road. I sat on the bench by the pond, perched on tree stumps, logs, fallen trees, took detours, ran – for the hell of it – and found myself writing. And the thing is, I know I couldn’t have done that if I’d have been with someone else.

This is, of course, not a slight on the people I spend my time with. They’re lovely and wonderful and keep me busy and stop all the introspection that has always caused me to write poetry in the first place. But today it was comforting to realise that writing these little snippets might actually be something that I do, and not just a product of indulgence and suggestion. And that I don’t need a personal trigger, I’m not just a person who write about Things That Have Happened To Her, I can think outside of the box.

I’ve realised that I can write on my own, in fact, I’m much better at this sort of thing alone. I can forget other people long enough to be myself, as the postcard in my bedroom says.

I fact, I could be learning, or re-learning depending on your point of view, how to write the sort of thing that could be read, and the kind of thing that reflects me. I’ve always said I’m no good at photography, and I can’t draw to save my life. So I was a little surprised today to find that what I was writing were little pictures caused by the things around me. Back in the day when I was writing about Feelings and the like, I would have laughed at the thought of myself writing poems about nature, and the world. “I’m not William fucking Wordsworth”, I would have thought. And I’m not!. So while the things I penned today are still Things That Happened, they’re (hopefully) more accessible, and more reflective of where I’ve gone with this. There is more to write about than Feelings, and I always knew that. It’s just nice to know that I can do that sort of writing – or at least, I have the potential to, as dangerous as potential is.

Learning to write again is a slow process, and it looks as though it will involve a lot of time spent on my own. But I kind of like that. I think I can work out how it’s done on my own. For the past eighteen months I’ve been hopefully carrying a notebook and pen around with my when friends and I go to visit nice places. Turns out, the nice places are irrelevant. It’s the being on my own that helps. Which explains why I always think of something to write when I’m doing something unconsciously; like driving, or washing up, or taking a shower – and not when I’m trying to do something complicated like remember how to co-ordinate all my limbs and breathing at the same time while at the gym.

Also, this means that NaPoWriMo may not be the terrible, painful, woeful struggle I expected it to be! But let’s not count the chickens yet…

Sun-bleached and stripped of bark,
Someone’s initials scratched into dead flesh,
Lean toward one another.
Curve up. Curve down.

Couples sit on smooth soft logs;
Old. Young. Together.