The audience for the 'invisible play'

Although audiences for radio drama have shrunk in recent years, coinciding with more radio adaptations of stage plays, the genre is by no means dead, writes Peter Crawley.

This certainly doesn't look like the picture of concentration. In room A109, a modest space in University College Dublin, faces gaze out through windows. Some of those attending allow their chins to fall slowly to their chests. Others even close their eyes.

Appearances can be deceiving, however, and despite such outward signs of disinterest (or perhaps narcolepsy), Dr Dermot Rattigan persists with his presentation at the conference organised by UCD's department of Drama Studies in conjunction with RTÉ Radio Drama. Later, he commends those attending for their focus. As he hits the play button on another excerpt from yet another radio production of King Lear, his audience is performing the very activity that is Dr Rattigan's speciality.

They are listening.

Listeners, it hardly seems worth stating, are vital to radio drama, but in asking what role such drama can play in contemporary culture, the Theatre of Sound conference is full of such axioms. Rattigan, author of Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imagination, concludes his comparative analysis of various Lears with the announcement that, for radio drama, "its only restriction is that it is only sound", and this makes it "a contained art form". Such containment rarely comes across as a virtue, however, according to the various speakers that follow him.

Playwright and author Tom Kilroy, for instance, considers his recent RTÉ radio adaptation of his novel The Big Chapel a failure, opining that the narrative complexity of the book was simply too difficult to communicate to a listener. Later, playwright Bernard Farrell, who has written several plays specifically for radio, trumpets the genre as a writer's medium ("It's often like whispering a story into someone's ear"), but warns against thinking too big. Yes, radio can represent the sinking of the Titanic as easily as a walk in the park, but a cacophony of sound effects will compromise the medium's clarity, sinking the narrative faster than the boat.

With radio drama considered more limiting than liberating by academics, producers and writers, what hope is there for the future of the ailing genre? Some days after the conference, RTÉ Radio's recently appointed features, arts and drama editor, Lorelei Harris, is determined not to see radio drama as a cultural invalid. "I don't see myself as a St John's Ambulance person at all," she says. I think if you look at the schedule that we have for this year, which admittedly would be a reduction in the number of hours of radio drama of many years ago, it's pretty buoyant." Indeed, under RTÉ's "new regime", as the national broadcaster restructures, increases its licence fee and issues a statement of commitment to commissioning and producing more drama, the signs are more positive than they have been for years.

Radio Stages, six stage plays on radio, including Aidan Matthews's Communion and Michelle Read's Play About My Dad, is currently being broadcast on Sundays.

Running concurrently will be a three-part series of last year's P. J. O'Connor Award winners for new radio writing. Most hearteningly, a series of new commissions commences in September, featuring works by Pat McCabe, Gina Moxley, Declan Hughes, Pom Boyd, Donal O'Kelly and Christian O'Reilly. Furthermore, following the now annual live Shakespeare production in August (this year, Romeo and Juliet), a half-hour slot for new writing appears in September. "So this is the background that you're talking against really," says Harris.

People literally tend to talk against a background of radio. Part of the medium's endurance in an increasingly visual culture has depended on its unobtrusiveness, providing listeners with acoustic wallpaper. Where Orson Welles could exploit the trust engendered by radio's crucial medium of mass communication in the late 1930s, famously terrifying millions of Americans with his adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, over the intervening decades radio drama has lost both its reach and its urgency.

Today, listeners are promiscuous (thanks to the democracy of the dial) and often passive, tending to leave the radio on while doing other things: gardening, jogging, driving. This is one reason radio is sometimes defined as a secondary medium. For drama, however, radio has become something of a second-run medium, forsaking the uniqueness of the invisible form for the obvious difficulty in adapting stage "shows". It is a throwback to what the BBC's first director general, Lord John Reith, conceived of in his paternalistic vision of public service broadcasting: an edifying dissemination of the theatrical canon, a "national theatre of the air".

"You can think about radio drama in a number of different ways," says Harris. "You can think about it as the medium whereby we bring what is current on the Irish stage to a wider audience. Another part of it would be to develop radio drama as a form sui generis, which is what our core task would be: to bring on radio drama writing as a form. And it is a very different form from writing for the stage. It's a different discourse altogether, or it should be. Frequently, if you try and take stage plays and do them for radio, they don't work very well."

Indeed, when Dermot Rattigan says of radio drama that "sound is its totality", in the case of adaptations, this seems more like sensory deprivation than opening up imaginative possibilities for original work. It is the difference between drama on radio and drama for radio. How, for instance, does a producer portray a scene from Waiting For Godot in sound alone, where the text reads, "Yes, let's go," while the stage directions insist, "[They do not move\]"? Meanwhile, as the Irish Playwrights' and Screenwriters' Guild has repeatedly made known, contemporary writers are hungry to work specifically for the medium.

Both Harris's scheduling policy and the support for original radio drama from RTÉ's new director of radio, Adrian Moynes, are encouraging developments. It is a prevalence of stage adaptations over the previous five years of RTÉ's drama programming that led to a perception of radio as the theatre's "poor cousin".

Laurence Foster, a senior producer at RTÉ and one-time head of radio drama, goes some way to explaining the sharp decline in theatre listeners over the past few years.

While broadcasting stage plays fulfils part of the station's public service brief, Foster believes that such adaptations came to dominate drama scheduling at the expense of new work, and consequently stifled an exploration of the possibilities of the medium.

"We were in the market for years of commissioning new writers - that was the brief of various heads of radio," says Foster. But, under Helen Shaw's five-year tenure as head of RTÉ radio, stage adaptations came to dominate the thinning drama slots. "We're only doing one play a week now, whereas we used to do three. So when that one play is an adaptation or a theatre company coming in, it seems that you're narrowing your focus. The art of writing for radio is going to vanish if that continues." Vanishing is an odd predicament for what George Bernard Shaw approved of as the "invisible play".

Paradoxically intimate and impersonal, radio addresses a mass audience as an individual listener. "I find it more useful to think in terms of the listener than the audience," Harris concedes. "After a certain level, the audience doesn't exist. It's a statistical construct." This is one crucial difference between radio drama and stage plays, or the auditorium and headphones. In the theatre, the audience collectively contribute to the performance. For radio drama, little is even known about how the listener responds. "We never get feedback from them," admits Foster, "unless they don't like something."

Daniel Reardon, producer of the annual live Shakespeare broadcast, is on the samewavelength. "It's hard," he says. "For the actors as well, pouring their hearts and souls into a performance, and at the end of it, the producer comes into the studio and says, 'Well, thank you very much', and then off they go. And it can be a very unsettling experience for an actor. At least, with these live shows, you do have that recognition and appreciation of their performance with the applause of the audience."

Nevertheless, the audience for RTÉ's sole drama slot, the Sunday Playhouse, has dwindled over the past three years at an astonishing rate. Just as the RTÉ Players were being finally phased out in 2000, JNLR figures for Sunday Playhouse were a miniscule 14,000. In just two years, that number had fallen to 8,000.

Although Harris considers that this statistic represents more people "than would fill the collected theatres of Dublin on any given night", it seems odd to judge radio by theatre terms. Financially, however, the comparison is rather canny. A radio play's budget is "mega", says Laurence Foster, compared to a DJ slot for instance. "But you can't get the curtain up in the Abbey for under €150,000, and you can put a radio play on for an hour for six grand." The sad fact remains, though, that the health of radio drama across the globe is measured by the rate of its decline. Foster is optimistic that the new echelon in RTÉ radio will be more sympathetic to drama, "so you probably will get a resurgence.

"But," he adds, "the awful thing is that when you get into a trough, it's very hard to get back up again." Appropriately, the means of reclaiming the airwaves for drama may depend on frequency and fidelity: the frequency of programmes and a fidelity to both listeners and time slots.

"Some people would say, 'Radio drama? I thought that was dead and gone years ago'," claims Dr Rattigan. "And that's a shame, because there are some very good plays that are happening, and if people knew when they were on, there would be listeners. I would say it's \ being brave with schedules."

With RTÉ now attempting to redress the balance between adaptation and origination, while taking chances with new drama slots, everyone agrees that it is vital to raise the profile of their endeavours. What a shame it would be if the theatre of sound should suffer from a lack of visibility.

Radio Stages continues on Radio 1 with Play About My Dad by Michelle Read on Sunday at 9 p.m. The Radio 1 Playwright Award winners begin on June 16th.