Better Than Magritte: How Drama on the Radio Became Radio Drama

Abstract

Using British radio and stage drama as its example, this article explores how a new medium took over an old genre and, after attempting to reproduce it closely, gradually modified it into something more suited to its own character. Initial disagreements about the significance of radio's blindness were attributable to the unreliability of pure sound as an epistemological guide. Yet this unreliability is a source of radio's unique dramatic strengths: It is a "theater of the invisible," severing drama's recent connection with spectacle and renewing its pristine association with speech. Radio drama has, in its turn, influenced the conventional theater.