Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

Abstract

Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his formally experimental fiction.

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• radio drama
• minor genre
• voice
• intimacy
• form

Notes

1. Among possible exceptions, one could mention Birat (2013), who addresses the generic hybridity of Phillips’s (2007) Foreigners: Three English Lives, or articles focusing on how Phillips uses generic pastiche (see, for example, López-Ropero 2002).

2. As Laurence A. Breiner (2003) reminds us, this radio station promoted the work of several of Phillips’s Caribbean literary predecessors in England through the programme Caribbean Voices, which was broadcast between the Second World War and 1958, and thereby “played a crucial role in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, especially poetry” (98).

3. It is interesting to note that The Wasted Years was aired again by the BBC on August 27, 2017, which bespeaks the quality of its script and the continued relevance of its preoccupations.

4. See Ledent’s (2015) reading of Phillips’s (2009) novel In the Falling Snow as a development of his early stage plays.

5. It should nevertheless be added that some recent studies have also called attention to the importance of the visual, notably the filmic, in his work, which is not incompatible with the importance of the vocal that pervades his writing. See Ranguin (2016) and Su (2013).

6. This also explains why this novel has been analysed in terms of musicality (see Mascoli 2017).