Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Blake Ritson, Samuel James, John Dougall, Sanchia McCormack, Carl Prekopp, David Sterne, Maeve Bluebell Wells, Finlay Robertson, Nick Murchie, Sarah Ridgeway, Georgie Glen, John Bowler, David Sturzaker.
There can surely be no argument as to the importance of H. G. Wells’ contribution to British literature, amongst the finest of his generation, and continues to inspire, to stimulate the minds of readers and would be writers around the world, whether in Science Fiction of which he is the undoubted Godfather, and through his political convictions as a staunch socialist and the writer who set the ground work for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and being adopted by the fledging United Nations not long after his death, there cannot be many who have not felt his touch upon their own writing and thought as the man who bought the Martian invasion to England’s soil.
The argument comes not from Wells but from those who have tried in earnest to adapt his numerous works, to bring the science and the fiction together in a showing to which late 20th and early 21st century viewers of large and small screen can appreciate fully. The issue, in truth, has long been one of contention, and it is not surprising as the complexity of imagery is as difficult to traverse and capturing the emotion felt by the reader of his works; not least in the magnificent War Of The Worlds.
Perhaps such an adaption works best when it is on the radio, when it can allow the imagination to roam in a way that television and film cannot convey without it asserting its dominance over the human senses. Whilst the 1938 Mercury Theatre broadcast, placed forever in radio folklore and captured superbly by Orson Welles, may have offered a tantalising glimpse of the panic it could drive into the public, and the beauty offered in Jeff Wayne’s singularly brilliant musical to which remains the most outstanding contribution to the canon; Melissa Murray manages to frame the story in its rightful setting without giving way to idealism and the rancour of deliberate misleading injection to which many an adaption has succumbed.
Ms. Murray’s play for radio does change parts of the much-loved novel but doesn’t tamper with the underlying themes of the story. There is still the sense of deviltry weaved through the narrative, the understanding that the start of a new century is a time for old thought to pushed aside and superstitions to be forgotten, not least in the excellent dialogue between Robert and his wife when they discuss the seeming macabre way in which a voice captured on gramophone is unseemly, grotesque, the work of evil spirits that shouldn’t be tinkered with.
Whilst the central character of George is replaced and the moral ambiguity of the stress of English belief as a nation is given a broader sense of place, the drama manages to capture and convey the utter helplessness and yearned for hope that the novel brings to life; and it is to Ms. Murray that the play succeeds as much as it does whilst being arguably constricted by the ungainly images the reader has been shown before across the last 70 years which has done much to encumber and burden any future performances in its wake.
Beautifully written, War Of The Worlds is an audio drama that does much to restore the honour of one of the great stories of the last 130 years.
Ian D. Hall