RADIO REVIEW: Is it reverse snobbery that makes me cringe when a radio programme is billed as an "evocation" of something or other? Or maybe it's not a cringe but a blush: "evocation" should be a critic's word, perfectly vague and vaguely sophisticated, and when a programmer or PR person uses it I have to wonder if he or she is on to my secret stash or, worse yet, is trumping me by utilising it more meaningfully than I could ever hope to do.
On Sunday Playhouse (RTÉ Radio 1), the word made it all the way into the long form of this week's title, Scenes from an Inquiry: An Evocation of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972. It's a mouthful but, darn it, "evocation" has a genuine job to do there: Dave Duggan's radio play, the word warns us, is not the Bloody Sunday tribunal but rather a literary simulation. Perhaps the warning is just as well in an era when actual tribunal transcripts have made it past the radio studio and onto the theatrical stage; but despite the vocal presence of Joe Taylor and Ann Marie Horan, no listener could have mistaken Scenes from an Inquiry for Tonight with Vincent Browne.
Listeners might well argue even with the word "play", inasmuch as it suggests some conventional dramatic structure or development. Duggan's work, while sometimes play-ful, was more of a poem for many voices, 16 scenes that picked up fragments of Saville but then sent its unnamed "witnesses" flowing down streams of consciousness and memory. There's probably a point there about the futility and even cruelty of legal processes that force people to reconstitute their experience in two-dimensional courtroom narrative: in scene 1, "A Cartography", the witness, shown a map, wants to talk about his late mother's house: "Every time I pass my mother's door I wanna knock on it." He protests to the tribunal counsel: "Memory can't be flattened out by pointing . . . your maps have no depth, no mud, no fear, no blood." Some of these scenes are less "evocation" than fantasy, a goosepimply dream of what Derry should have said to the English lawyers who have returned to the scene of the crime. In scene 2, "A Rockery", a woman demands: "Show me some of the stones we threw that day," then insists that local people have kept the rocks and managed to build their lives with them. Scene 6, "A Library", finds the witness defiantly quoting Barthes and Kinsella, while scene 7, "An Episcopacy", features a witness (whom the context tells us we should think of as "Bishop Edward Daly") reciting Lady Macbeth's soliloquy.
Occasionally spot-on sentimental, the play was funny too, between "Ted Heath" talking idiotically about his boat and the female counsel's ever-patient Thank-you-m'luds at the judge's interventions. Events occasionally degenerated into fabulous madness, as in scene 8, "A Bestiary", when a witness's memory spilled over with mythical creatures on the city streets. "Yes, yes," the judge interrupted irritably, "but if we could just concentrate on the basilisks for the moment . . ."
If it's hard to get at the underlying truths of a few minutes' state-sanctioned slaughter in Derry, imagine trying to dig through the evidence of "aggressive accounting" at Enron. For Global Business (BBC World Service, Sunday), presenter Lesley Curwen visited Houston, Texas, where the giant angled E no longer stands in front of the company's gleaming skyscraper. Despite, or perhaps because of, its focus on Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins, this programme didn't offer much of a critique of the wider business and political culture that gave rise to the Enron scandal. In fact, in its half-hour the word "Bush" was never even mentioned, despite the presidential dynasty's links to the company and to chairman Ken Lay. Only one of the show's many talking heads complained about the inadequate laws that followed the crisis: "There was not enough political backing for strong legislation." Apparently it's something to do with corporate executives who make campaign contributions.
Former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Arthur Levitt reckoned investors should take more responsibility.
"They should invest based on their own efforts, and facts, rather than on whispers and rumours." But what about this other guy who says it's "the essence of being an American to take risks"? Let's face it: success depends overwhelmingly on access to high quality whispers and rumours.
Last week's column berated my betters (Gerry Ryan) for insufficient accuracy, then described Dublin's Anna Livia FM as a community station; it is in fact, and oddly, licensed as a "special interest" station. Thanks to the community-radio emailer who spotted the error, and the irony.