radio review

A couple of weeks ago, Shelagh Stephenson's play The Memory of Water opened at the Hampstead Theatre, with all the paraphernalia of a London first night: celebrities, critics from all the national papers, not to mention the London press, party afterwards. By comparison, her Five Kinds of Silence, broadcast as Radio 4's Monday Play last night, arrived rather quietly; though it's to my mind a more powerful play; and that's saying a good deal.

Both plays are about families - specifically about parents and children, and the way that parents live on in their children despite everything the children do to escape. The principal differences are that The Memory of Water was realistic in style, with recognisable characters, although it was drawn from the imagination; Five Kinds of Silence was a surreal gothic fiction, featuring a barely believable picture of family life, but was based on truth.

The play opens with Billy, the pater familias, being shot by his daughters, Janet and Susan, and then follows the aftermath of the killing - police, questioning, jail, eventual release - through their words, with occasional comments from the women's mother, Mary, and running through the whole play, a whining, vicious and lyrical monologue by Billy, hectoring and threatening them from beyond the grave.

Billy, it emerges, has kept his family in prison for years - beating them if they made too much noise, or if they buttered his toast in the wrong direction, forcing all three women to have sex with him (the daughters wear wedding rings to keep other men off). Next to this, a remand centre is bliss: the girls write to their mother saying: "Last night we had baths with as much water as we wanted, and it was as close to heaven as we've ever been." Alongside this, you're also given a sense of the deprivation and violence that's shaped Billy's life, and his sense of his own monstrosity ("I was born aged six," he announces, "with teeth and a black heart"). There's a marvellous combination of bleakly humorous understatement (seeing Billy's corpse, Mary says, "He looks nice and tidy lying there like that") and twisted eloquence here, put across superbly in Jeremy Mortimer's production by Sue Johnston, Lesley Sharp, Julia Ford and Tom Courtenay.

The Memory of Water has established Stephenson as a promising newcomer; taken in conjunction with Five Kinds of Silence, it ought to be obvious that she's something more than that. But, of course, Five Kinds of Silence was on radio; so chances are nobody will notice.