Sarah Weatherall

Director of The Colonel by Caroline Gilfillan

'It’s a medium that lets the imagination run free. It’s the spoken word equivalent to song.  You’re left to imagine the pictures. It can let you into someone’s head and allow you to walk around with them. It’s confessional, it’s first person, it’s I.'

Sarah on directing The Colonel by Caroline Gilfillan

Thank you
A big thank you for being asked to direct one of Channel 4’s first radio dramas!  It was a unique opportunity.

Now
Now we’re in the age of hyper-realism in drama; hence all those long medical words, when they rush the stretcher through the doors in ER.  That’s the challenge of making radio drama now. People expect their experience to be subjective rather than objective, they need to be in the centre of the story, as first person.

Radio Drama as a medium
People used to say that radio drama was like theatre for the ears, but now people working with the medium compare it to film.  You tend to think that way too, setting up a sound picture, so the audience know they’re in a new location. As a director, you think in terms of shots, a close-up of someone speaking, a long-shot down a corridor.  The big difference between radio drama and theatre and film/tv is that you have to say or somehow show, through sound, a reaction to an event.  As you can’t cut to a shot of, say, an empty bed, or someone looking sad, you need to write in those reactions.And as a drama is a series of reactions to events; these reactions have to sound true. 

We’re due to edit on Sunday
I’m already worrying that some of the reactions and impulses from the actors won’t ring true.  There was a scene when our protagonist was being hit while he speaks; I think I should have asked for more vulnerable responses.

We were on location
John Dryden who was mentoring us directors, has a theory that people rarely speak without doing something.   So he allows his actors to move through an acoustic space which brings a more authentic sound picture to the story.  He’d booked us into this music studio in North London which is a converted fish market.  It was the perfect environment to record our drama as it had different rooms with different acoustic settings. 

The Colonel is set in Chile in 1973 when the Socialist government was overthrown by General Pinochet’s military Junta.  During the coup, thousands of students and Socialists were picked up and imprisoned in the National Stadium in Santiago and shot.  It’s a shocking story and I tried to think of it in London terms: imagine going on an anti-war march and finding yourself facing a firing squad in Wembley Stadium.

The script was set in a Private London Hospital
It tells the story of Pablo and Elena two young Chileans in a series of flashbacks.  He’s  a young idealistic student. She’s more middle-class and conservative, hanging out with a Socialist, because it’s cool.  They’re imprisoned in the 1973 coup, but manage to escape.  Years later Pablo is working in a private hospital in London and comes face to face with a former torturer.

Despite this interesting premise, the script seemed surprisingly lacking in suspense. I concentrated on casting and producing a faithful telling of the story, attempting to root the drama in the sound of 1973, seeking out archive footage of the coup from the BFI. I contacted the Chilean Embassy who put us in touch with Alfredo Cordal, a poet and journalist who was put under house-arrest during the coup.  Alfredo became our advisor and touchstone for the production. He chatted to the actors so they could pick up his Chilean ‘hs’ and vowels, and taught the cast and crew socialist chants for the demo-scene. 

Working with non actors
Alfredo also played a soldier and a demonstrator, and I’d hoped to cast another non-actor in one of the main roles.  But, I’ve learnt, running a theatre company, non-actors are brilliant and authentic in the sphere of their own experience.  But to ask them to characterise something outside their own world: for example a rape, and to drive a scene was too much to ask, particularly in the brief pre-production time we had.

The great strength of working in radio drama
It’s a medium that lets the imagination run free. It’s the spoken word equivalent to song.  You’re left to imagine the pictures. It can let you into someone’s head and allow you to walk around with them. It’s confessional, it’s first person, it’s I.

Radio drama on 4 Radio DAB
It has to be stories from people you’d never hear anywhere else. I’d begin with first-person real-life stories. I’d ask people to write down what happened to them and send them in, not in script format, just as… “this is what happened to me, this is what I went through.”  Then I’d probably do the same with professional comedians and run two different genres, a comedy-drama series, and a more serious, confessional one.  I’d also like to do a series about an agony aunt or a counsellor who has problems but no-one to talk to.  Any series would converge with the web too.

Radio drama is a great resource for training too
It covers, performance, voice, script editing, script writing, production, sound recording, sound engineering, sound design, directing, casting, music and web-writing, web-films/support.

Future stuff
My theatre company is developing an idea of working with addictive drinkers and making it into a series of first person radio stories.  We’d like to bring this to 4 Radio and be involved in any future opportunities.

Check out the other directors for The Radio Play's The Thing

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