While many of the radio plays we have reviewed on Theatreview have been adapted from stage plays or even recorded from a live theatre performance, Chad Taylor’s Close to You was developed from his short story, published in The Listener (remember that?) in 2001.

I confess I have tended to listen to radio plays, in the past, while doing something else – although tuning in while driving can allow for reasonable focus. The Lockdown opportunity has convinced me devoting due time and attention to listening, as with watching a live performance (remember those?) or reading a book, is only fair. Some do require full concentration. Close to You certainly does. I listen three times to get the hang of it, and a fourth time to – somewhat obsessively, I know – ‘time-stamp’ key moments.

The first few minutes set up some intriguing questions. A man – who narrates the story from time-to-time – is picking up a woman from hospital; she wants to go back to the house but he says no point, there’s nothing there; it’s raining heavily as they get to his ute; her hand is bandaged; he’s been reading a book that involves LUXE – Large Underground Xenon Experiment …

There’s tension between them; she gets stressed when she can’t tune the radio; he chooses right when she says left because he wants to see her place (despite having told her there is no point in her going back there). She lives in a small town that he sees as a ghost town, yet she doesn’t know who her neighbours are; she stays in the car as he goes to check out the house.

I contend it is fairly basic that listeners are always wanting to know the who, what, where, when and why of the story they have committed to. But at more than five minutes in, neither character has been named yet and I’m wondering how long we have to wait before we know what their relationship is. I like a good mystery and value the strategy of making us really want to know something before it’s revealed so I have to trust these details are being held back to maximise a dramatic pay-off.

Meanwhile his commentary about points of ignition etc, as he surveys the scene, reveals what has happened to the house and that he is something of an expert in this realm. It’d be a spoiler to reveal it here but I’m glad there is something tangible, as it were, to work with now. And I wonder if there is something metaphorical or allegorical in his description of it. The question now is what connects him and her to this event. This is/was her home and he is seeing it for the first time. So they are not partners. What, then?

The dramatic structure is contingent on the slow reveal of their history, together then apart, including events which began when she was 5 years old. The who, what, where and when of the story do emerge. At the 10:25 mark he calls her Jay. At 14:00 Ken, who turns out a bit later to be her flatmate, comes into the picture. It becomes apparent the narrator and Jay shared a childhood in the country – an incident at the creek has been formative in their relationship. Fire and water are emerging as contrasting elements in the story; it is raining heavily all through the day he’s driven south from Auckland to the small town where she is in hospital then on to the house in the ‘ghost town’ where she and Ken lived.

At 18:13 the narrator calls her Josie. And it’s around this point the narrative structure becomes a complex and confusing blend of his (no name yet) narrating the tale of this relatively recent event, switching into present-action dramatisation of his time with Josie and in the small town, flashbacks to key childhood moments … Then suddenly he’s telling Josie about Pamela and how he had to attend counselling to get his divorce – and we get flashbacks to his counselling sessions.

It emerges he’s a fireman and will never have kids because he has seen kids burnt and it makes him angry. “Who else makes you angry?” is a question he never answers. He does mention his interest in the LUXE to the Counsellor, concluding, “The more you see the less you know.” Which may be a hint to listeners that it is futile for us to expect to understand the underlying ‘why’ of story he’s telling.

Now we are back, or forward from that point, to the day he’s sleeping after night shift and awoken by the phone call that gets him up and will send him south. And it’s here (at 24:20) that he says, “She’s my sister.” As narrator he interjects, “I was waiting for the call.” He narrates his drive to the hospital and arrival at her bedside where his chat, while she’s apparently sleeping and on a morphine drip, involves more information about Pamela, people changing, wanting different things … The point of including all this seems to be to encourage Josie to seek counselling too. And of course he – like us – wants to know what happened.

His conversation with the Doctor, Manson, involves comparisons between being a doctor and a firefighter. It is when he rings Ken (at 30:30) that he reveals, “This is Neil. I’m Josie’s brother.” It doesn’t feel like an ‘aha moment’ payoff, just a relief to get that unnecessarily withheld detail cleared up. More dramatic is Ken’s reluctance to talk, his fear that he’ll be blamed, countered by Neil’s compassion and clear understanding that what’s happened was not Ken’s fault.  

Now Neil’s narration takes us back to the first incident, when Josie was five: their father’s reaction, the fact that she didn’t do it again until a month after their father had died, the mother’s method of trying to teach her impulse control. “That was never going to work,” says Neil. He flashes back to how Josie came to his bed for warmth and comfort, her concern that he would always be taller, older, get to go first and die before her; her somewhat obsessive-compulsive numbering of time and days …  

The final scene is between Neil and the local Barman, over steak and chips, beer and bourbon. More of Neil’s adult back story is revealed – and the Barman’s too, by way of comparison and contrast, I suppose. On his way back to his motel, Neil as narrator tells us, “At an atomic level the world doesn’t behave as it should.”

Whether this is true or not (I assume it has something to do with the LUXE), I’m afraid it doesn’t give me a deeper understanding of what has just transpired. I find myself preoccupied with the years between childhood and now, the fact that Neil was expecting the call, and how come Josie has never been called before the law to account for her actions with counselling being a condition of her further freedom. Plus the whys – including why did siblings, so close that the story and play is named after their relationship (The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ is part of it and closes the production), become estranged, and why has Neil been complicit in allowing his sister to remain a danger to herself and others?  

As Neil and Josie, John Wraight and Victoria Gillespie are entirely credible, encouraging us to trust that the realities they clearly understand will become apparent to the listener. Indeed all the actors ( the others being Rebecca Gumley, Francesca Emms, Mark Atkin, AJ Murtagh, Sebastian Macaulay, Nina Smith and Paul Brennan) add credence to the story with committed performances.

Technically the soundscape is rich – and sometimes confusing. At one point I feel sure they are out of the ute and walking through rain when it turns out they are still in the cab. Soon after the fast footsteps on a wooden floor seem to contradict the stated fact that is all looks different to Josie and she’s puzzled by all the number dotted about the floor. This is a production that includes ‘shot on location scenes’ – which always amuses me, given the location sound recorded on film production is almost always stripped and recreated through the very Foley sound effects that were pioneered in radio drama. 

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