From Radio Waves to Your Screen

If you listened to The Dear Departed on ArtSound Radio Theatre Monday night (31 May, Episode 251), you were laughing along with Mrs Slater and Mrs Jordan — those two sisters squabbling over the furniture while Grandfather inconveniently refused to stay departed.

But have you ever wondered how radio drama actually happens?

Thanks to our Upstaging Canberra Festival partnership with Mill Theatre, you can now see it. The complete performance — actors reading from scripts at standing microphones, doors slamming and footsteps created live, music underscoring every scene — captured in front of a very appreciative live audience.

The Dear Departed — A collaboration between The Mill Theatre at Dairy Road and ArtSound – YouTube

What You’re Actually Seeing

This wasn’t just a play performed as if it were radio. It was a live radio play — the real deal, exactly as your parents and grandparents heard on the ABC back in the 1930s and 40s. No television. No screens. Just voices, sound effects, and imagination.

The Dear Departed is perfect for this format. Stanley Houghton’s 1930s one-act comedy skewers middle-class pretensions with gleeful precision — Mrs Slater and Mrs Jordan bickering over grandfather clocks and sideboards while their “dearly departed” father, very much alive, watches in amazement. It’s absurd, it’s unkind, it’s uproariously funny. And seeing it made live before your eyes? Pure Canberra theatre magic.

Before television arrived, this is how Australia told stories. Families gathered around the wireless set for Blue Hills, When a Girl Marries, and hundreds of plays just like this one. ArtSound Radio Theatre and Mill Theatre just brought that tradition back to life — and recorded it for you.

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