Listening Piece Commentary, English Language and Literature Essay

My listening audience piece was inspired by the old man in Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, thought evil by the protagonist, but given no voice to express himself. My protagonist is an elderly character with a dark side, similar to Angela Carter’s in The Werewolf. To subtly reveal this hidden personality I adopted the style of Alan Bennett’s monologue Playing Sandwiches where he gradually builds suspicion of the speaker, ultimately revealing the horrible truth. I created a radio monologue told from the viewpoint of an elderly lady, intended to make the listeners think about the secrets that lie hidden behind closed doors in regular people’s lives, typical of the Gothic. The exposition of my piece introduces the lady as a kind soul: ‘I’m sorry; Miss Hawking doesn’t live here anymore’. I used apologetic politeness ‘I’m sorry’ to encourage listeners to like the character. The nonstandard auxiliary verb ‘was’ m akes her speech sound natural ‘Had herself a nice feller too; they was having a baby together’, as does the colloquial lexis ‘feller’. The visitor is a dramatic device to allow the lady to speak her thoughts. When she talks of romance, the protagonist’s language is more like a written story than spontaneous speech, ‘Then he held her that night, under the moon, with the stars all shinin’ from above.’ She uses discourse markers, lexis like a romance novel, and conventional romantic imagery of the moon and stars, suggesting that she has played it over and over in her head. Because this is a monologue, the visitor’s presence is only implied by the protagonist’s speech. Instead of stage directions my protagonist says everything needed to imply the action ‘No, no, you needn’t take your shoes off ‘. The repetition of the negative ‘No, no’ and the lack of back-channeling begin to reveal her unusual side, sounding a bit too firm with her requests while covering it with a polite tone. Cumulative word count: 317 From here I slowly reveal her darker side making listeners question her knowledge of the couple, and her mental health: ‘the milk’s been in there a little too long I’m afraid.’ To construct her mental breakdown in the line, ‘I, I, Sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me’ I used a false start to show her nervousness and fear, and the adjective ‘sorry’ to echo her opening line. Her identity is revealed when she changes from second to first person in mid-sentence ‘She loved you †¦ and you turned me into this’. I implied that she has been tracking him since he left in a series of photographs in a locked room personifying her feelings: ‘The room won’t forget’. Her change in register, ‘She was pretty, for a whore†¦ You Bastard’ with taboo lexis unnerves the audience because it subverts expectations of how an old lady should speak. Writing this piece has crystalised the difference between spoken and written language for me; in creating it I felt the need to say it out loud to ensure the voice accurately reflected the speech of an old lady. Overall I believe I did so effectively as the register change at the end is quite striking.