RADIO / An infinite treasure: Robert Hanks on an audacious Jew of Malta and some blatant Dirty Tricks

THE Jew of Malta (Radio 3, Sunday) was the last in Radio 3's cycle of the complete Marlowe plays, and easily the best. Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris are short plays that manage to seem long, Tamburlaine actually is long and manages to seem longer; the summer's production of Dr Faustus was too self-consciously wacky, and Edward II was uninspired. But The Jew of Malta - well, it would be wrong to say that it had it all, but it did have Paddy Cuneen's frantic score, some audaciously artificial sound effects and, chiefly, Ian McDiarmid in the title role.

To be harsh, McDiarmid didn't find many depths in Barabas; but frankly, depth can be overrated. Barabas could, just about, be played as a victim, a noble Jew rejected by an uncaring society, as has happened to Shylock. You could present his evil and greed as a reaction to anti-Semitism, although given his catalogue of crimes - which includes murdering his own daughter, a couple of friars and an entire conventful of nuns - you would be pushing your luck. But as his name suggests, Barabas is a caricature Jew, greedy, rootless, hard-hearted and egotistical. The point isn't that he's nice; it's that, however bad he is, and however bad you play him, he doesn't seem any more wicked, and a good deal less hypocritical, than the gentile establishment he's pitted against. They think that war is honourable, usury a crime; and then they confiscate Barabas' estate to buy off the Turks. They treat him as an outcast, and then complain of his disloyalty when he sells them out.

It's a part that gives enormous licence to an actor, and McDiarmid took full advantage. He played it outrageously Jewish, energetic and sarcastic - reminiscent of Antony Sher's superb performance in Peter Flannery's Singer, broadcast on Radio 4 last year (a thought that makes you wonder how far Marlowe was Flannery's inspiration). Switching from gloating to seething to self-pity with a rapidity suggestive of uncontainable intelligence, McDiarmid sounded as though he wouldn't fit in a normal-size recording studio - an infinite treasure in a little room, to coin a phrase.

Something of the same mood of Machiavellian glee came across in Dirty Tricks (Radio 4, Thursday), a new series of features about, roughly speaking, the art of winning wars without actually cheating. Part 1 looked at misdirection (dummy tanks, fake maps, et cetera) as practised on the western front in the First World War and in North Africa during the Second. There was some effort to point out that the programme wasn't trivialising warfare - a cunning plan usually involves killing fewer people than an all-out frontal attack, it was pointed out. The sober note was subverted by Peter Snow's eager presence, though, and in this case at least, nobody was deceived.