Between the lines
Kate Chisholm
Two men, a single piece of music and a script that’s barely 40 minutes long. And yet when it was over I felt quite stunned; shaken and unnerved by a totally unexpected dramatic twist. I’d been so absorbed, thinking in my own clever way that I knew what was going to happen, that I understood what I was meant to think about the characters and what they were up to. But then, suddenly, all those expectations were blown apart. Address Unknown, adapted by Tim Dee from the book by Kressmann Taylor, was one of the most effective afternoon plays I’ve heard in a long time. If you missed it, I hope you’ll be inspired to Listen Again (it’ll be available on Radio Four, Afternoon Play, until next Thursday), as an extraordinary example of the power of radio to take over your mind and play with it. You may find the first ten minutes a little contrived, almost too knowing, too predictable, but it’s worth persisting. In the last few minutes, those voices, underpinned by the subtlest use of music, worm their way into your mind, until you suddenly realise, with sickening dread, what the characters are really thinking, what they are really trying to do.
Taylor’s book, we were told by the writer Anne Karpf in a short introduction before the play, was actually a novel that was first published in America in 1938. Despite the fact that it was only 54 pages long, it had an enormous impact, shocking readers with its graphic fictional evocation of how the rise of Nazism in Germany was transforming and corrupting people, even those who had no reason for despair, or hatred. With the onset of war, though, it was forgotten and it fell out of print until its rediscovery and republication in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Once again it became a bestseller, and not just in America but throughout the world, its dramatic power made more telling by the realisation that it was written before the events of the second world war and not with hindsight. Because of this it gained an extra authority; as if it was not just talking about the particular circumstances of antiSemitism in the 1930s. Taylor, after all, was not writing from within the maelstrom either of Germany itself, or of the years of war. (Taylor, by the way, adopted a pseudonym to protect her identity as a woman; her real name was Kathrine Kressmann, the Taylor came from her first husband.) What she lets unfold is the insidious unmasking of two individuals who at the beginning appear just like anyone else, full of affection and goodwill for each other.
Address Unknown consists merely of a few letters between two men, Max, an American–German Jew living in San Francisco, and Martin, his former business partner, also German but not Jewish, who has returned to live in Munich in 1932 just as Hitler has come to power. These letters tell with an amazing economy the story not just of their friendship but also of the impact of what is happening in Germany. It’s left to us as readers (or rather listeners) to figure out what’s not been written, or rather said, between them.
It’s a perfect device for radio, and especially when directed with such simplicity by Tim Dee. Henry Goodman and Patrick Malahide read the letters, while the music was skilfully interwoven into the script, fading in and out of the readings so that it almost became a character, like the chorus of an ancient Greek tragedy, voicing in atmospheric music the underlying truths that could not be put into words. (For once, thankfully and perhaps deliberately, we were told at the end what it was — Alfred Schnittke’s piano quintet — almost as if it, too, was a member of the cast.) If you’ve ever wondered why radio is such an effective way to put ideas across, then this play provides the explanation, almost scarily so. In real life it’s so often not what is being said but the pauses in-between that matter, and on radio, when directed skilfully, it’s that area in-between and underneath which is somehow brought out for us to hear. That’s why radio is such a brilliant companion for the lonely. It provides the extra dimension of experience which TV just cannot create. Somehow on the small screen those pauses and silences get lost, drowned out by the background music or the flickering of the image on the screen. On radio they can last for almost 40 seconds (if the producer/director is daring enough), allowing room for the listener to think about what has been said, so that you begin to hear the voice within you as it echoes through your mind. Stop reading now and go listen.
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