Escape into silence
Kate Chisholm
It was a daringly original thing to do. To write a play where the heroine stays silent for most of the time. And the drama’s creator, Anthony Minghella, cleverly conceals her reason for doing so until the very last sentence. I can remember listening to Cigarettes and Chocolate when it was first broadcast back in 1988. It sounded so different, so strange, and still does after almost 20 years. Radio Four repeated it on Saturday afternoon as part of a short season (shared with Radio Three) to celebrate the work of Minghella, who died in March aged just 54.
The play (starring a very youthful-sounding Bill Nighy and Juliet Stevenson) begins with everyone leaving messages on Gemma’s answerphone in the hope that at some point she will pick up the receiver and talk to them. But she resists the temptation, withdrawing utterly from her circle, pretending not to hear or take in what they are telling her, and turning instead for solace to music, in the hope of finding something profound within the harmonies of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But of course her wilful silence provokes everyone around her into verbal diarrhoea, especially Rob, her none-too-reliable lover (no prizes for guessing who took that role), and her friend Lorna (played by Stevenson), who has been having an affair with Rob. Not until the very end do we hear from Gemma, who we discover has decided to give up talking for Lent (‘Last year it was cigarettes. The year before chocolate. But this is the best’). She has chosen to escape into silence, to start looking for what is within that silence, to realise just how words have become our first punishment, a Babel, an excuse for not thinking.
At the time, Minghella’s use of the beeps and burps of the answerphone sounded cutting edge and it’s a bit odd now to hear them and realise how rapidly they have become obsolete. But his way of cutting through relationships and exposing them in all their naked truth still sounds original. The production (by Tony Cliff, with Minghella himself directing alongside Robert Cooper) had an eerie, echoey atmosphere, so that we as listeners focused in on what was being said — and its ghastly, unstoppable inanity. (Next Saturday listen out for Minghella’s Hang Up on Radio Three about two lovers in a latenight phone call, which also starred Juliet Stevenson and was just as memorable.) Next day if you’d had almost three hours with nothing to do except sit and listen you could have been witness to an extraordinary performance of Othello on Radio Three. The Radio Times this week wondered whether it was ever possible for Shakespeare to work on radio. It seemed like a daft question to me. Surely, Shakespeare’s plays are so important to us not so much because of what actually takes place on stage but in the incredible way in which he puts words together. It’s not stagecraft that counts, but the delivery of those speeches, those riffs and self-reflections. And listening on radio is a brilliant way to really hear them, to appreciate fully the sheer variety of pace and tone and language, from Othello’s tellingly simple ‘But yet the pity of it, Iago! O! Iago, the pity of it, Iago!’ to that wonderfully evocative, ‘of one whose subdu’d eyes/ Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees/ Their med’cinable gum.’ I must say I found it very hard to sit myself down in an armchair and truly to listen for all that time without nipping upstairs or foraging in the kitchen. But it was worth the effort. I heard so much more by not being distracted by the rich brocade and choreographed movement, and discovered all kinds of other currents running through the play which before I have never really noticed. Partly I think this was because the performance was not made for radio but was adapted (by Penny Leicester) from the award-winning production at the Donmar Warehouse, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan McGregor as Iago.
This was a cast who had acted the play together many times and knew their lines from memory. No one had to read them, but could speak them from the heart. There was a quite different power to their delivery than in a usual play for radio, and a distinctive quality to their timing and interaction, so that it was much easier to observe for instance how often the words ‘honest’, ‘pity’, ‘jealousy’ are repeated by all the characters; how at the beginning terrible things are said about the Moor’s blackness, his difference, his absolute inappropriateness as a husband for Desdemona. You did not have to see them acting together to feel the tension that was being generated between them. And even if at times it was difficult to tell who was stabbing whom, it didn’t really matter. If only Gemma could have heard it, perhaps she would have regained her faith in the remarkable flexibility and possibilities of the English language.
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