Functions

     Radio drama as storytelling tends to serve a number of purposes. It can define national cultural identity through original writing and performance. Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, described as "a play for voices," is central to the consideration of Welsh literary achievement in the post-war period and is respected internationally as an example of radio drama literature par excellence.

     Radio drama can be a location for the exploration of social, cultural, and sometimes political anxieties through popular soaps and long-running series. The popular soap has been a staple in the history of radio drama in many Latin American countries. Public and state radio in Poland has a long-standing tradition of supporting "high cultural" writing as well as being popular in plays and serials.

     Through social action dramas, radio can warn, educate, and improve society through a blend of information, education, and entertainment. The British Broadcasting Corpora­tion's (BBC) long-running radio soap opera The Archers was conceived as a method of improving the efficiency of farming techniques when there was still rationing in the aftermath of World War II. Social action dramas are prevalent in the developing world, and radio offers an opportunity to engage in the oral culture traditions of African and Asian countries.

     Radio dramas also offer an arena for showcasing and adapting novels and short stories as well as stage literature from live theater. This has been the case in most Scandinavian and European countries. Hungary, France, Germany and Italy have extensive archives of scripts and recordings demonstrating radio drama's commitment to producing their countries' leading writers and dramatists.

     Finally, radio drama has been used as propaganda and in support of war. Conventional plays and series are constructed to influence listeners ideologically, and the techniques of dramatization have been harnessed to fake enemy broadcasts, to deceive military forces, and to weaken the morale of the enemy's home population. In the early 1950s the CIA used audio drama techniques to fake the sound of a non-existent army and airforce to overthrow a left wing government in Guatemala.

Political Economy of Radio Drama

     The success of soap operas in the United States and Australia during the 1930s and 1940s represented mass communication and popular expression for new writing on an enormous scale. Dramatizations of literature and significant original plays had their place when the profit-led radio corporations saw an advantage in prestigious productions impressing commercial sponsors. Sometimes a minority cultural program such as Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air pulled off a publicity stunt, such as the 1938 War of the Worlds, and this popularized radio drama in terms of entertainment.

     But spending profits for prestige was not a recipe for stability and growth in the arts. If the capitalist, corporate moguls of the 20th century became the equivalent of patron princes from the Renaissance, they were adept in applying the ruthlessness of those princes when cutbacks were needed. Publicly funded national radio networks have been the cultural umbrellas for most of the original radio drama produced in the world and the sound dramatization of prose and poetry. However, the financial relationship between radio drama production centers and their state-funded national radio networks is often clouded by the potential for political compromise and economic expediency. Radio drama has been at the mercy of economic instability and the political pressure to reduce public expenditure. The prerequisite for public funding is sometimes predicated on how well state-funded radio drama performs in comparison with the audience surveys of its commercial counterparts. As a result, radio drama in some countries such as Australia now concentrates on high culture and experimentation rather than the maintenance and production of popular series and serials. In France, radio drama has undergone a painful reappraisal through rationalization and cutbacks.

United Kingdom

     Leading playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Torn Stop­pard have written extensively for the radio medium. Stop­ pard's stage play Indian Ink was conceived and first produced as the radio play In the Native State. Britain's playwright Caryl Churchill had nine of her radio plays produced by the BBC up until 1973, when her stage work began to be recognized at the Royal Court Theatre. Hanif Kureishi, regarded as one of Britain's leading Asian writers, famous for his film My Beautiful Launderette and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, was first produced on radio. Sue Townsend, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Plater, Anthony Minghella, Angela Carter, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell, and Louis MacNeice are a few other literary luminaries whose writing roots were planted in radio drama.

     One of the paradoxes of radio drama is that highly accomplished and revered writers who have chosen to specialize in this field remain locked in a cabinet of obscurity. Rhys Adrian, who died in 1990 after having written 32 plays broadcast by BBC radio, is an example of such a writer little known today.

     Giles Cooper cultivated the art of dramatically counter­ pointing the exterior and the interior of characters who felt themselves "trapped in the contemporary machinery of modern life and who were unable to escape." Cooper wrote over 60 scripts for BBC radio. His 1957 play The Disagreeable Oyster, along with the production of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall, was fundamental in creating the need for a permanent sound workshop to create aural images based on effects and abstract musical rhythms.

     In 1939/1940 BBC Radio Drama commissioned and pro­duced In the Shadow of the Swastika, which offered a humanist challenge to the anti-Semitic prejudice engendered by Nazi ideology. The occasion of war stimulated a production that may have commanded the highest audience for any play broadcast in the history of radio. Norman Corwin's We Hold These Truths was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the United States Bill of Rights. This coincided with the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and eight days after the attack, Corwin assembled a cast of the country's leading actors including James Stewart and Orson Welles and broadcast to an audience of 60 million listeners across all the U.S. networks. Many of the dramas and drama-documentaries produced by Corwin throughout the war were preoccupied with themes that promoted the Allied cause and challenged the morality of the Axis powers.

Germany

     Germany possesses a rich and diverse critical tradition of the radio drama form, but the language barrier means that its wealth of texts is inaccessible to the radio drama communities of the English-speaking world. It is also ironic that one of the most prolific, versatile, and widely published critical analysts of British radio drama is the German academic Horst Priessnitz. Radio drama has also been frequently used as propaganda. Nazi Germany used skilful mixtures of popular music and drama to psychologically intimidate Allied troops and civilian populations. They were sometimes aided by United States and British fascists. The U.S. academic Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach used dramatic scripts in overseas English broadcasts to attack the British position in the war. He translated a radio play by Erwin Barth von Wehrenalp called Lightning Action to celebrate the German victory in Norway. ​​Twelve scenes were recorded on 5 April 1941, and the cast included the British film actor Jack Trevor and other ex-patri­ ots. He also satirized Roosevelt's Lease-Lend Bill with a series of dramatic talks called British Disregard for American Rights. In May 1944 U.S.-German academic Otto Koischwitz wrote a doomsday radio play for the D-Day invasion forces and their families at home that was broadcast by shortwave to the United States. The actress Mildred Gillars ("Axis Sally") played the part of a GI's mother who in a tear-stained monologue predicted disaster and grief.

     An argument could be made that German radio drama is distinctive for the greater importance it has had within the cultural traditions of German drama and literature. There is evidence that Horspiel has generated a cornucopia of inspiration and originality in other storytelling media. The Weimar Republic era is distinguished by the work of playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Paul Hindemith, critic Walter Benjamin, and composer Kurt Weill. They and many other pioneers understood the relationship between sound drama and radio reception and interrogated and explored modernist ideas of stream of consciousness found in symbolist novels and short stories, imagistic poetry, and developments in modern theater.

     Whereas German Radio Drama has mirrored the BBC in generating a powerful canon of popular drama, dramatized literature, soap opera, light comedy, and detective and mystery series, German Horspiel has become established as a literary art and drama form equal to stage theater, film, television, and literature. Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz reached a popular audience through German radio in 1929 before it was produced for television by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The nihilistic torpor of Nazi propaganda radio suffocated expression in the art form, and after the war the cultural role that radio played offered a rich arena for diversity and quality. The shortage of printing paper and the destruction of theater and cinema meant that radio drama contributed to the recovery and development of German storytelling. Decentralization of the structure of public stations meant that several centers of radio drama production flourished simultaneously.

     The positive public response to the transmission of Wolfgang Borchert's The Outsider in 1947 illustrated the centrality of Horspiel in the country's social, psychological, and cultural psyche. Bochert, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Gunter Eich illustrate the force of literarische Horspiel, and Peter Handke, Jur­ gen Becker, and Reinhard Lettau are auteurs who represent that development of Neue Horspiel that sought to explore new ideas and philosophies about the prosody of sound and thought in modern and postmodern society.

Canada

     Original radio drama thrived in Canada because the government had decided to support public radio through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Canadian radio drama experienced a golden age of literary and dramatic expression from the 1940s to the 1960s. Canadian radio drama has been re-inventing itself in the public sector. CBC has maintained an imaginative and flexible approach to international co-produc­tion. Director James Roy helped originate the 1996 series Searching Paradise, co-produced between CBC in Toronto, ABC in Perth, and BBC Wales in Cardiff. He also pioneered the introduction of The Diamond Lane, a lively modern soap drama sitting comfortably with CBC's peak time morning format for 2 years during the late 1990s. The series featured live performances of actors as commuters traveling to work using a freeway lane reserved for vehicles containing three or more passengers and interacting with the on air presenters in the studio. The development of the English Speaking Radio Drama Association has facilitated the exchange of publicly funded radio plays such as CBC's Mourning Dove and work done in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Wales, Los Angeles, Australia, and South Africa.

Sweden

     Swedish public radio has discovered new storytelling forms to find a new generation of radio drama listeners. The dramaturges at Swedish Radio have cleverly propelled radio drama into the mainstream of artistic and cultural debate by creating a five minute soap opera that is broadcast within the peak listening morning slot between 7:50 and 8:00 A.M. Eva Stenman­ Rotstein at the publicly funded Swedish Radio Broadcasting Corporation has steered a series of evolutionary changes to young people's radio drama that has captured a new generation of listeners. Storytelling for children and young people has also attracted sizable audiences.

Asia and Africa

     The literary and dramatic traditions of African, Arabic, and Asian countries are virtually unknown in Europe and North America and other English-speaking countries. Many western societies are struggling to reconcile themselves to a past history of racist structure of education, imperialist history, and negative stereotyping of other countries' political, industrial, social, and cultural values. Furthermore, as these societies seek to realize their own multi-cultural status, interesting examples of creative reception in radio drama is emerging. British Asians and Afro-Caribbeans have found a confident voice in writing and production.

     The satirical comedy drama series Goodness Gracious Me originated on BBC Radio 4 and has successfully transferred to television. Whereas the BBC of 1929 would produce Shakuntala or The Lost Ring by Kalidasa with a translation by a European academic, direction and performance by an all white European cast, and orientalist attitudes to promotion and representation, the BBC of 2003 would mediate a classic work from an Asian by transferring the interpretation to Asian writers, directors, and performers. The Africa Service of the BBC has been a substantial patron of writers, dramatists, and poets from Africa, and producers have sought to create a co-produc­tion dynamic between London's Bush House and the writers, directors, actors, and audiences in African countries. An annual competition produces a series of radio plays called African Performance.

Japan

     In the early 1990s the Television and Radio Writers' Association of Japan set up and ran an international award called the Morishige Audio Drama Contest. Over a period of four years, productions were entered from all parts of the world and were given equal treatment. The representation in this competition revealed a thriving and comprehensive infrastructure of radio drama practice and tradition from African and Asian countries that had not been as well represented in European dominated international competitions and festivals.

     The Television and Radio Writers' Association had about 900 freelance writers/members and set up the award to stimulate the support of radio drama within the domestic and international radio industry. It also sought to make "a contribution to cultural exchange." The Morishige Award succeeded in its second objective. The first objective foundered on the lack of funds to continue the contest. The Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union had also been seeking to encourage cultural celebration and exchange. In 1993 the Morishige selection committee were in the position to consider three plays entered by the state broadcasting system NHK, based in Tokyo and Nagoya, and further entries from Kyushi Asahi Broadcasting Company, Tokyo-FM Broadcasting Company, the Tokyo Broadcasting system, and Nippon Cultural Broadcasting. These plays demonstrated a fertile and competitive field of audio play production in both publicly funded and commercial sectors of the industry.

     An entertaining representation of Japanese radio drama can be found in the film by Koki Mitani, Welcome Back Mr. McDonald (1998). This is a backstage farce that uses a live radio drama to send up Japanese society, American blockbuster mentality, and the prima donna values of show business.

Korea

     The Korean Broadcasting System's (KBS) entry for the 1993 Morishige Prize was The Angel's Curse written by Choi Jae­ Do, directed by Cho Won-Suk-KBS's Chief Producer of radio drama. At this time Korea, like Japan, had a thriving broadcast dramatists' association with 500  members who were also ​​established poets, novelists, and stage playwrights. Korean radio drama could draw upon a profession of 400 actors. KBS was producing 200 or more single plays every year. New writers for radio were continually being brought on through special competitions, and rhe commercial broadcasting corporations produced 30 new radio dramatists every year in this way. There was also evidence of radio drama production and broadcasting in China, Mongolia, Uganda, Egypt, Hong Kong, Malawi, and South Africa.

India

     In 1993 plays by the director Kamal Durr had been entered in the Morishige award from All India Radio, which at the rime of writing presented a considerable range of Indian radio drama on the internet. In 1991 P.C Chatterji observed that the powerful theater movement in several parts of India had only "marginally affected the field of radio drama." He said that the ordinary run of radio play was "nor of a high standard" because the rate of payment was poor and there was little hope of their utilization elsewhere. He cited Tumhare Chum Mere Hain (Your Woes Are Mine) by Delhi playwright Reoric Sha­ ran Sharma and Harud (Autumn) by Shankar Raina as examples of radio texts that had successfully transferred to theatre and film and been recognized internationally.

Radio Drama Futures

      From 1990 there has been a maturing of a global spoken word marker so that the talking book, sound drama, or sound dramatization have been fighting for equal space on the shelves with traditional books. Radio drama's ephemeral status as an art form could be at an end. The performance of a dramatic script no longer exists just in the fleeting moment of a live stage event. It is being captured on cassette, compact disc, mini-disc, computer file, and other means of electronic storage for replay. Multimedia and the internet offer exciting dimensions to sound drama production and storytelling. The radio dramatist has been liberated from the dimension of short-lived terrestrial sound broadcasts.

     Erik Ohls and rhe Swedish Radio Theatre in Finland have been pioneering the use of the internet for rhe promotion and more meaningful distribution of radio drama as an artform. Distribution of linear sound narrative can interact with lateral channels of sound, text, animation, and photographic and video images on rhe world wide web. The web is also a lib­ era ring from the point of view of control and means of production. The British website www.irdp.co.uk is an example of the internet being used as an independent space for new writing in radio outside the territories of state-funded broadcasting. Sound communication on the internet is nor subject to government licensing and censorship. Transmission is ​​instantly stable in the international dimension and the technology is affordable.

     In 2001 BBC radio commissioned a project called "the Lab" to explore the features of audio drama in terms of interactive communication technology. The internet, with its hypertextual lateral routes of structured narrative and digitalization, seemed able to expand the potentiality of sound storytelling. Similar experimentation has been undertaken by the drama department of Austria's public radio service.

     The challenge facing radio drama producers of the 21st century seems to center on how the radio play can attract the younger generation when the form is nor relevant or central to their media consumption. The BBC in Britain and public radio broadcasters in Europe and elsewhere have been trying without much success to establish thriving audio drama projects with young people and ethnic communities using new forms of interactivity via the internet. The fact remains that the most lucrative resources of radio drama funding in European public networks are controlled largely by middle-aged and middle­ class people.

     The development of digital radio in Britain has resulted in the establishment of two national radio channels dedicated to audio dramatic genres, BBC 7 and Oneword (commercial). The BBC has the advantage of a huge back catalogue and the cushion of guaranteed funding from the license fee. Diversification of access to the broadcasting spectrum and an equality of opportunity in public funding may be a potential solution to continuing decline in radio drama activity in Britain and the rest of the world.