Cate Blanchett's Radio 4 drama is superb, but she shouldn't be banking on any awards

Telegraph

23-04-2025

At last month's BBC Audio Drama Awards at Broadcasting House, the actor Jonathan Keeble stepped onstage to accept the award for Best Actor. He was not claiming it for himself, however, but for the somewhat starrier Sean Bean, who had not been able to attend. Tongue firmly in cheek, Keeble praised his Antigone castmate for scooping the award for what was only his second ever radio play, 'while I have starred in more than 900'.
Keeble's self-deprecating witticism was intended to highlight the sterling work of director Pauline Harris, who had coaxed such a remarkable performance out of Bean, despite the actor being relatively unfamiliar with the medium and its rhythms. Yet, he also, perhaps inadvertently, got to the heart of British audio drama – it does not live and die on the Sean Beans of this world gracing the airwaves with their undeniable presence, but on the Jonathan Keebles.
However, as the future of audio drama is debated and fretted over, and audio big boys such as Audible and Amazon grab a slice of the pie, there has been a recent trend of eye-catching casting. Great British thesps have always relished radio drama – Toby Jones is one in recent years whose on-screen success and prolificness seems not to have dimmed his passion for audio drama – but the recent BBC Radio casting headlines have been glitzier still. We have had no less than Ed Harris, Kim Cattrall and Johnny Flynn starring in the CIA origins drama Central Intelligence. And at the weekend there was double Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett making her radio play debut in Wallace Shawn's The Fever (Radio 4, Saturday).
Radio 4 has promised to protect long-form audio drama, following Radio 3's decision to axe the 90-Minute Drama, and who could fail to be seduced by an hour-and-a-half of Blanchett, directed by John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett (the director/choreographer duo responsible for Black Watch and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child)? I imagine the production will have split the Radio 4 audience – not because of Blanchett's performance, which was enthralling, but because Shawn's monologue, first performed in 1990, is a vicious and naked assault on complacent, liberal, bourgeois attitudes and lifestyles, a Dylanesque stream of bile and vomit that the audience/victims are never allowed to turn away from.
'Do you have any poor friends?' spits Blanchett's anonymous traveller at one point. She lies on a hotel room floor in an impoverished country on the cusp of violent civil war; unable to move, she examines her life and values, and finds herself wanting. As a diatribe against capitalism, it occasionally is a little trite (it is, remember, 35 years old, and written at the height of Yuppy New York), but Blanchett brings to life the soirees and the theatre trips, the dinner party debates and the art gallery openings. It is savagely funny. In one moment, she comforts herself that she is a good person with strong values because she once steered the conversation away from being critical of the advertising industry – because her friend's father works in it. Shawn's glee at going for the jugular and his distaste at Upper West Side intelligentsia hypocrisy is still palpable.
Whether Blanchett will attend next year's BBC Audio Drama Awards remains to be seen (she will surely be nominated), but if she does, she should not expect to automatically walk away with a win. Central Intelligence was nominated for two awards and, given the presence of Cattrall on the night, those on the shortlists alongside her drama promptly tore up their acceptance speeches. Yet, democracy reigns in British audio drama, and Central Intelligence (which is excellent) won neither Best Original Series nor Best Podcast Audio Drama. Blushes, if there were any, were spared by Central Intelligence taking the Outstanding Contribution award. It's certainly brought in listeners.
There is a different hierarchy in audio drama, made stark by Best Original Series going to Al Smith's emergency call-handler drama Life Lines for an impressive fourth time. An eighth series is out this year, which means that while Blanchett must contend with Michelle Yeoh, Andrea Riseborough and Michelle Williams at the Oscars (as she did in 2023), in the world of audio she will do battle with Sarah Ridgeway, Life Lines star. Not a household name, but something approaching royalty in British audio drama circles. However, Blanchett's debut was seductive and superb, melting the 90 minutes away like wax, and if she really wants to quit Hollywood and do something more meaningful with her life, I have a suggestion – star in a few more BBC audio dramas. There may even be an award or two in it for her.