Audio Drama 2: 10 More Plays for Radio and Podcast

By Neville Teller

Neville Teller is a veteran radio dramatist, with more than 50 BBC radio plays under his belt and scores more produced and broadcast across America by the San Francisco-based Shoestring Radio Theatre.

Back in 2019 he published his first collection of ten radio plays, Audio Drama. They were so welcomed that he decided to make another ten available. These were published in 2021 under the title More Audio Drama. Now it has been decided to reprint that volume, though under a new title: Audio Drama 2.

So here they are – ten more of Neville’s plays for radio and podcast, all of which have been produced and broadcast across the USA. If you are one of the worldwide listening audience who love radio drama with its power to create images in the mind’s eye, Audio Drama 2 is a book to treasure and enjoy.

As for podcast producers, these scripts are available for production and online distribution with no strings attached – no performance rights, no royalties since all the dramatisations are based on books in the public domain. These are ten fully realised audio drama scripts, studio ready.

Audio Drama 2, like its predecessor Audio Drama, which is still available, is a volume carefully designed to delight both the radio-loving public and podcast producers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803134666

Neville Teller

Neville Teller was born in London, and had a varied career in advertising, marketing, publishing, the Civil Service, and a national cancer charity. Concurrently he was writing for the BBC as a dramatist and abridger, and has more than 50 BBC radio dramatisations to his credit. Latterly, as guest playwright for an American radio production company, his work is being heard by radio and on-line across the United States. In 2006 he was awarded an MBE “for services to broadcasting and to drama.”

Book preview

Foreword

Before Shakespeare launches on his account of Henry V’s adventures in France, he has his Chorus address the throng of groundlings waiting in anticipation for the play to begin.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts…, he begs of them.

"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth…"

Aware of the restrictions that a stage, scenery and props impose in recounting great events in dramatic terms, Shakespeare knew how much depended on the words he conjured up and on the actors who mouthed them. He was also anticipating what audio drama would be able to help an audience achieve four hundred years later. The radio medium would allow its listening audience overcome the restriction of perceiving only what was set before it – a restriction inevitably imposed in theatre, film and TV drama. With nothing to see, the radio listener would nevertheless see horses, hundreds of them, whinnying and stamping.

The unique quality of audio drama – the term being increasingly used in recognition of the ways, in addition to radio, now available to disseminate it – is that it builds a private and exclusive picture in the mind of each separate member of its audience. It becomes a personal experience, individual and different, for each person listening.

Audio drama gives the widest possible scope to the imagination of both writer and listener. In a radio play you can have inanimate objects converse, you can have people speak and also communicate their innermost thoughts; in an instant you can be whisked from earth to Mars, from the top of mount Everest to the deepest coal mine. And the images that listeners experience are the most vivid of all – images in their own mind.

Audio drama allows writers almost limitless freedom of expression, and perhaps that is why it has attracted the most brilliant writers and poets, often at the beginning of their careers – among them Louis MacNeice, Henry Reed, John Betjeman and Laurie Lee. Major works have been created for radio, including Samuel Becket’s All That Fall, Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, while the list of writers who made their dramatic debut on BBC radio is long and glittering, and includes Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, John Mortimer, Brendan Behan, Angela Carter and Susan Hill.

Somebody once wrote to the papers about how disappointed they had been at a stage performance of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. I responded, pointing out that the piece was originally written for radio, and represents the high-water mark of the now-defunct BBC Radio Features department, which raised the art of radio to its greatest height.

The producer who brought Under Milk Wood to listeners was Douglas Cleverdon, and he later wrote that he had persuaded Thomas to drop his original idea of a plot in favour of exploiting the versatility of the radio medium. It is precisely because Under Milk Wood is constructed as a collage of voices, moves rapidly in time and space, and alternates speech and unspoken thoughts, that it makes brilliant radio and indifferent theatre.

Writers who want to try their hand at audio drama might be inhibited by the thought of coming to grips with an unfamiliar medium. Despite the plethora of advice available on-line, some of it contradictory and much of it not particularly helpful, outside suggestions cannot really assist the creative process. A writer’s inner vision, or flash of inspiration, is unpredictable. What might help is advice on bringing an imaginative concept to life in audio terms – advice which I hope the audio dramatisations in this volume exemplify.

Surprisingly, there is no universally agreed format for audio drama scripts. Search audio drama on Google, and dozens of suggested templates are thrown up, while the sample scripts on the BBC’s Writer’s Room website appear in a host of different presentations.

There are one or two basic requirements, though. An audio drama script needs to be set out in three distinct areas of the page. The extreme left is reserved for the characters’ names, best printed in bold capitals; next, nicely indented, comes the dialogue; beyond that, further indented, come the technical directions. As you will see from these scripts, my practice is to print them in bold capitals, and enclose them within brackets. Other templates – to my mind rather unattractive – show them in underlined capitals.

Normal practice is to set line spacing at one-and-a-half, and it is essential to number your pages. It might be impossible for a producer who lets an unnumbered script fall to the floor ever to reassemble it. There is no real need in the early stages of writing an audio drama to divide the play into separate scenes, or to number the speeches. These steps follow when the script is being prepared for production.

The sound palette available to the audio dramatist consists essentially of four elements: the spoken word, music, sound effects and technical devices.

Dialogue can, of course, make or break a drama, and an audio dramatist in particular needs an understanding of how to make characters, but also the piece as a whole, live through what is said. Narration is an important element in many audio dramas, and its tone, place and purpose within the piece needs to be carefully adjudged, especially if the narrator is also a character within the play. Some basic instructions to actors should be included, in lower case italics and in brackets, in the dialogue section. A scene set at a tea-table could include eating, drinking, by the character’s name. If a character is moving towards or away from the listener while speaking, the dialogue script should specify advancing or retreating.

Judicious use of music, even just a snatch, can establish mood and period in an instant. It can also be used to punctuate a drama, or to emphasise an especially dramatic point. The writer needs to indicate in the technical directions where music should appear, and perhaps the type of piece in mind, but once a script has been accepted for production, it is the producer who will normally have the final say.

Sound effects should be indicated in the script within the technical directions – for example, if you need a door to be opened. A word of advice: if you direct that a door is opened, you must also remember that often – not always – it will need to be closed, or the sound picture conveyed to the listener is of a permanently open door. It will niggle some of your audience when they should be concentrating on other things. If a telephone is lifted and a conversation held, you will normally need to specify that the receiver is replaced. Doors, telephone receivers, crockery and cutlery if characters are talking over a tea-table, are spot effects – that is, sound effects produced in the studio and recorded with the dialogue.

Technical directions include a range of effects that can enhance the sound picture. For example, if you place characters inside a church, or within a cavern, the voices will need to be provided with an echo by the studio manager, via his magical console. Your script will need to specify both the location, and the need for an echo. When two characters are on the telephone, one will be with the listener, the other’s voice will need to be electronically altered. Indicate which one. This the studio manager will do, on your instruction as to which character’s voice needs to be on distort.

The most basic of all audio drama techniques, perhaps, is the fade – that is, fading the volume as a scene ends, sometimes when a character is speaking, sometimes on a sound effect or music. It implies a change of venue or the passage of time. Fade or Fade out would be the technical direction. Depending on the effect required, the listener could be carried into a new scene gently (Fade in), or brought straight in (Full up).

A look through this volume, or a search on-line, will provide an aspiring audio dramatist with radio drama scripts, and the techniques of writing for a listening audience will become apparent.

Back in 2019 I published Audio Drama: 10 Plays for Radio and Podcast – a collection of ten of my own radio dramatisations which had been broadcast either by the BBC or across the United States. The book was intended primarily for lovers of radio drama and for audio drama podcast producers looking for material on which to exercise their technical skills. The volume was well received, and during the coronavirus pandemic that hit the world in 2020, podcast producers in various countries used those scripts to mount virtual audio productions of their own.

It is in light of that book’s favourable reception that I feel encouraged to offer the audio-appreciative community this second volume of 10 audio dramatisation scripts. All these radio dramatisations have been produced and broadcast across the USA and into Canada by Shoestring Radio Theatre, an independent radio production company founded in 1988 by producer Monica Sullivan, and based in San Francisco. Once again, I make them available with no strings attached. The works on which they are based are literary classics, and are in the public domain. The copyright in the audio dramatisations rests with me, and I am content to provide them to audio or podcast producers to use as they see fit.

To both readers and producers of audio drama I say: Enjoy.

Lady Audley’s

Secret

A play for radio

by Neville Teller

based on the novel by

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Running Time: 90’

First broadcast across the USA on 28 July 2016

in a production by Shoestring

Radio Theatre, San Francisco

directed by Steve Rubenstein

Characters

(MUSIC. DOWN FOR)

(OPENING ANNOUNCEMENT. UP MUSIC.

DOWN FOR, AND LOSE)

(FADE IN UNDER FOLLOWING CHOPIN’S

ETUDE NO 3 IN E MAJOR)

(FADE PIANO)

(INTERIOR. FADE IN)

(OPEN AIR. BIRDS)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN INTERIOR)

(MOVEMENT, SWISH OF MATERIAL UNDER FOLLOWING)

(KEY TURNS IN LOCK)

(LID CLOSES. KEY TURNS)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN BUSY VICTORIAN LONDON STREET – HORSE-DRAWN VEHICLES, CROWDS. DOWN FOR AND HOLD UNDER)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN CHATTER, CROCKERY)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN SAME BACKGROUND)

(RUSTLE OF NEWSPAPER)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN. HOTEL LOBBY)

(FADE OUT. FADE IN SMALL SITTING ROOM)

(FADE IN. SITTING ROOM)