The Stage and Television Today
Thursday 5th August 2004

An actor cast as a terminal patient in Casualty can count on a shortage of dialogue and an abundance of medical props. There are no such constraints in radio drama, which over the past fortnight offered more deathbed scenes than the average TV medical soap. A comatose woman demonstrated lucid thought, a cancer sufferer mentally tap-danced her way into the next world, a stroke victim gurgled meaningfully.

The most poignant play did not feature imminent death but the living death of acute memory loss. Kaite O'Reilly's Ambushed By Time moved into metaphysical realms but was never purely abstract. The two couples struggling to cope were fully-fleshed. This was as much due to four moving performances as the subtle script. Owen Teale, playing Tom in a grave and arresting tone, said "all we are is DNA and anecdotes". His wife Katrin had lost her memory and chance of having a child in a motoring accident 20 years earlier. She was played by Angharad Rees, who brought out the vulnerability in a woman who could not remember the death of her mother and was shocked every morning that she seemed to have aged two decades overnight. What made the performance strong was that Rees tapped into Katrin's personality, preserved somewhere beyond the ravages of her brain.

Ronan Vibert was Joe, a former plumber whose pre-senile dementia was fast eroding his present as well as his past - he would look around and not know what he was doing. Catherine McCormack played his wife Sarah with a melancholy steadfastness, noting that "all our intimacy is in the past". When Sarah and Tom, united by their common plight, began an affair it did not seem a convenience of the plot and brought as much guilt and misery as escapism.


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