RADIO / Workers of the world: Robert Hanks on Nigel Bryant's hardnosed adaptation of Oliver Twist and Clifford Odets' stilted Waiting for Lefty

It may seem a bit late to be saying this, but Radio 4 has been running a six-part dramatisation of Oliver Twist which is really very good. Unfortunately, it finished last week, so we'll just have to hope it gets repeated. Still, better late than never; and it would have been difficult to praise Nigel Bryant's adaptation much before the end, since it took some time to work out how impressive it was.

This is partly because, to begin with, it sounded pretty awful: obtrusively dramatic music from an asthmatic accordion and obsessively gloomy cello, a couple of off-putting Birmingham accents (not something you'd expect BBC radio to be flaunting right now), and some close-miked, throaty muttering. It took some time to get hardened to this style, deliberately and creditably different from the run-of-the-mill classic serial.

Once you'd got this out of the way, though, you could appreciate how thoroughly this had been conceived in terms of radio. This stood out partly in two fine performances that would never have been allowed to see the light of day on television - Tim McInnerny's half-mad Sikes (too skinny) and Adjoa Andoh's hard- edged Nancy (too black). It also showed in Bryant's direction of some key scenes, such as Sikes's murder of Nancy. Too many radio fights try to illustrate the action; here, more sensibly, it was reduced to a mess of thuds and screams, producing a generalised impression of violence and horror.

As the weeks rolled by, you could also settle into Bryant's hardnosed approach to Dickens. This came through best right at the end: as kindly Mr Brownlow, just revealed as Oliver's grandfather, leads the boy away from a visit to the condemned cell where Fagin sits, he has a line that neatly encapsulates Oliver's new security: 'You're a rich young man, Oliver. Let's go home.' Instead of ending on that note, though, Bryant lingers a few moments more on Fagin's screams of horror - an effective if unsubtle reminder that a happy ending for Oliver has involved a miserable one for several other people.

The main flaw was that it was all crammed into less than three hours, and a lot of material was stripped out - what's the point of Dickens without sprawl? This is social comment without its social context.

You couldn't say this, at any rate, about Waiting for Lefty (Radio 3, Sunday), Clifford Odets' 1935 play about a taxi-drivers' union meeting. The cabbies are debating whether to go out on strike for better wages, but Lefty, their leader, hasn't turned up, and without him they are wavering. A representative from the union is trying to persuade them that a strike would be a really bad idea, and calling anyone who disagrees a Communist. One by one, though, the drivers stand up to re- enact their own stories, and to show that what motivates them is a simple desire for justice.

This is a naive little melodrama without any breeding, and it's easy to sit back and be amused by its presumption (that's all you are going to be amused by - it's not long on laughs). Seen from over here, a society where the right to strike is defended less stridently than the right to manage, it's practically quaint. What was possibly vigorous contemporary language then now sounds stilted and puzzling - 'We're stalled like a flivver in the snow,' a cabbie is told by his wife - and sometimes the message is spelt out too crudely ('Hello America, hello. We're storm-birds of the working-class, workers of the world').

But the clumsiness is at least partly intentional: Odets was trying to give voices to the inarticulate - as Kipling did, for all that he was writing on the other side of the Atlantic, from another age and with wholly contrary political assumptions. In Ned Chaillet's production, poker-faced acting from a mostly American cast and a helpful open acoustic (it was recorded live in front of an audience), it was still, for want of a better word, striking.