Neverwhere: hearing is believing?

 Neverwhere: The world we know and the worlds we don’t

To imagine as we read is one thing, and to watch someone else’s imagined version play out on screen is another thing. To listen to a story performed to you is something else entirely. Listening to drama feels like a combination of imagining and being imagined on behalf of; it’s a strange and wonderful middle ground between reading and watching. 

Neverwhere is a story I first encountered with Neil Gaiman’s original novel, and then by listening to the 2013 BBC radio drama adaptation. Before then, I’d never really encountered radio dramas. I'm not one for audiobooks, and radio dramas in my mind were adjacent and therefore not for me. I knew they existed, but hadn't thought of how they could open up the imagination in new ways. How wrong I was. Consider this post, then, a manifesto in favour of radio drama adaptation. 

Reading can sometimes feel like a lot of work. As we read, we’re constructing worlds and characters and environments in our imaginations, and whilst that’s a lot of fun and very exciting, part of why film can be so enjoyable is because that work is done for you by other people - you just have to lean into it as the viewer. That’s not to say that reading is harder work than film-viewing at all, I don’t believe that’s true. Instead, I just want to acknowledge that they are two different experiences, with different imaginative expressions. Radio drama, then, feels like something between the two. It’s playing directly on only one sense, but that doesn’t restrict the listener in any way. Listening to Neverwhere, I could let myself be taken away with the cast’s performances and the ambience of London Above and Below, whilst still feeling like I had the space to construct my own mental images. The sounds and voices gave me an anchor to the story without tying me to a particular way of imagining; they said “this is how it is to me, make of that what you will.” 

Neverwhere is a rich treasure trove of a story, full of adventure and unusual characters, but it also takes the world we think we know and turns it upside down. When we get to the end of the story our hero, Richard Mayhew, is faced with a choice between returning to the world he came from and jumping headfirst into the one he’s grown to know. In many ways, we don’t get that same freedom when we read or watch stories because ultimately we close the book or the credits roll and suddenly we’re back in reality. The point, though, is that our forays into other worlds do stay with us. They invade our senses, when we imagine them in such detail, and pieces of them never quite leave us. So lean into those sensory encounters with art, because you never know how they might change your perspective. 

(And as a side note, if you need any convincing to listen to this adaptation, I have two words: Christopher Lee.)