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Commercial competition has been bracingly good for the BBC's wireless networks. It's a long time since I've turned off an afternoon play midway through. And the big names in literary and theatre worlds are constantly popping up in the schedules. (It's such a good showcase for both.) The two worlds were brought together on Radio Four this week in an unusual commission for the actor Alan Howard's 70th birthday. Five writers - Tom Stoppard, Julian Barnes, Helen Simpson, Marina Warner and Nina Raine - were invited to write short stories for him to read. They created such a variety of monologues, designed to make the most of Howard's versatility as a 'voice' actor, seguing effortlessly from the elderly judge in Nina Raine's story fussing about 'verbal superfluities' to the bright young boy he once was.
Alan Howard Reads also gave us Matthew Arnold on honeymoon in Dover, leaning out of his bedroom window and inspired by the ebb and flow of the tide to write his poem On Dover Beach. (No prizes for guessing who wrote this one.) This was Stoppard in full flight, giving us in 13 minutes - plus a bit more, according to last week's Front Row, which revealed that he had been allowed 43 seconds more than the other four writers, much to their chagrin - a far richer study of newly-wed complexities than Ian McEwan's Booker-nominated novella On Chesil Beach. My favourite, though, was by Julian Barnes, who took us to the Hebridean island of Barra (where Howard has holidayed for many years). Howard plays a widower retracing the happy times he once spent there with his wife. Barnes gave us not just the ebb and flow of that marriage, but also a touching evocation of island life and why those of us lucky enough to have visited the Western Isles keep going back. It's not just the untamed landscape, but also the sense that here is a community untainted by the cheap values of metropolitan life.
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Kate Chisholm
The Spectator, Wednesday, 17.10.07