Thank you so much for writing about this - and so brilliantly. I've wondered for a long time what you'd make of the play.
Thank you for making it finally possible for me to see it! I think it holds up: it does everything it sets out to do, does it chillingly, and now I feel like the existence of Ghost Box makes eighty-five percent more sense to me.
Between the toxic mansoup (I like Collinson alone out of them, but he's no use to Jill in the end)
That's a good way of describing it. Collinson frustrates me the most, because for so much of the story he is so supportive of her (and so unimpressed with Peter, which is the correct response; I'm glad to have seen Michael Bryant first in a role where I could appreciate him as opposed to just wanting to punch him into the sun) and then he drops the ball at the worst possible moment. I get that he's under as much strain or more as the research team with the washer-dryer man and his entourage moving in and hasn't stopped being sincerely concerned for Jill (which Peter of course interprets as sexual white-knighting, because he wouldn't do anything else himself), but all he has to do is listen to her that afternoon she comes to his hut and he shuts her off instead. "Remember I'm on your side," he has to say, because for the first time it isn't true. Afterward, I think he understands at once what they did to her, including his own part. I just wish he'd done something different.
and the ragstone record, it still disturbs me, and the question perhaps that unsettles me the most; is the "willemite-green" ghost only a recording, or somehow conscious? I hope you're right, and it's the former.
It's less awful to me if it's conscious, because at least that implies some kind of meaning to the interaction, however rudimentary or malevolent—some intent, some purpose to the pattern. A dead mechanism senselessly collecting further deaths is just horrible. It doesn't know it's still hunting, or when its victim slot is filled. It just revolves under everything, insensibly lethal, the fringes of its influence felt sometimes in the stone-grey rumble of moving vans. It would be like trying to exorcise radiation. How could you ever make it stop?
One of the books I bought at the weekend chimes in with this post; David Toop's Sinister Resonance. It's a history of listening that treats sound as ghost, listener as medium. I've not read it yet, but looked in the index: no mention of The Stone Tape.
I will be very interested to hear how the book pans out, but that sounds like a serious omission! I understood why the teleplay was adapted for radio. I'll have to go back and look again at your review.
no subject
Thank you for making it finally possible for me to see it! I think it holds up: it does everything it sets out to do, does it chillingly, and now I feel like the existence of Ghost Box makes eighty-five percent more sense to me.
Between the toxic mansoup (I like Collinson alone out of them, but he's no use to Jill in the end)
That's a good way of describing it. Collinson frustrates me the most, because for so much of the story he is so supportive of her (and so unimpressed with Peter, which is the correct response; I'm glad to have seen Michael Bryant first in a role where I could appreciate him as opposed to just wanting to punch him into the sun) and then he drops the ball at the worst possible moment. I get that he's under as much strain or more as the research team with the washer-dryer man and his entourage moving in and hasn't stopped being sincerely concerned for Jill (which Peter of course interprets as sexual white-knighting, because he wouldn't do anything else himself), but all he has to do is listen to her that afternoon she comes to his hut and he shuts her off instead. "Remember I'm on your side," he has to say, because for the first time it isn't true. Afterward, I think he understands at once what they did to her, including his own part. I just wish he'd done something different.
and the ragstone record, it still disturbs me, and the question perhaps that unsettles me the most; is the "willemite-green" ghost only a recording, or somehow conscious? I hope you're right, and it's the former.
It's less awful to me if it's conscious, because at least that implies some kind of meaning to the interaction, however rudimentary or malevolent—some intent, some purpose to the pattern. A dead mechanism senselessly collecting further deaths is just horrible. It doesn't know it's still hunting, or when its victim slot is filled. It just revolves under everything, insensibly lethal, the fringes of its influence felt sometimes in the stone-grey rumble of moving vans. It would be like trying to exorcise radiation. How could you ever make it stop?
One of the books I bought at the weekend chimes in with this post; David Toop's Sinister Resonance. It's a history of listening that treats sound as ghost, listener as medium. I've not read it yet, but looked in the index: no mention of The Stone Tape.
I will be very interested to hear how the book pans out, but that sounds like a serious omission! I understood why the teleplay was adapted for radio. I'll have to go back and look again at your review.