Abstract
Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his formally experimental fiction.
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