BBC Radio 4, 21 January 2014
The musical refrain from
the Sixties children's classic Camberwick Green - heard three times - summed up the theme of this black
comedy.
For those who remember, each episode of Camberwick Green began with a musical box
turning, and a character emerging from within; they provided the focus of attention for the subsequent story. In Alison
Crawford's production, the theme was used to remind us of how little control most human beings have over their lives.
Angela Kilmartin (Michelle Holmes),
and her two children Lara (Lucy Gaskell) and Ewan (Adam Barlow) discovered to their cost that their lives had been scripted,
Truman Show-style, for the last quarter of a century. The man they knew as their father (David Birrell) was
an actor; their domestic dramas had been scripted. This was all done for the purposes of research - or so Mrs. G. (Rosie
Cavaliero) would have us believe.
Eventually Angela and her family decided to continue their involvement in the drama - only this time they
were responsible for the script. However, in an intriguing twist of the drama, they were not quite as responsible for
their own destinies as they might have assumed.
Paradigm was an intriguing piece, deliberately making fun out of the distinctions
between 'life' and 'art,' 'fact' and 'fiction.' The fact that the writer Sean Grundy appeared in the production as an
aspiring writer of the Kilmartins' future drama only served to complicate matters still further. The cast clearly enjoyed
themselves, although in a production of this nature it was difficult to tell whether they were simply "acting" as part of
their life soap opera, or truly expressing their emotions. Or maybe it simply didn't matter.
