As the critic Albert Wertheim explains, the physical presence of a stage and set fixes our perception of space and time. Where radio has a distinct advantage is in the way it quickly and easily manipulates the perception of time and space or renders them entirely fluid. Dialogue, action or narrative may even occupy different points of time and space simultaneously.
Radio allows for an entirely different perceptual and emotional experience of time and space.
It differs from the stage performance, but even from the more fluid media of film or video where our observation of the temporal and spatial is still fixed to a sequence of visual images and our imaginative participation is shaped and encumbered by the given visual resources and the limitations of their production values. There's no denying that these visual forms of drama can offer their own sort of very gratifying emotional and visceral impact. In this respect radio will always be at a sort of disadvantage. Just as the audio drama may easily compress multiple points of time and space so it may also readily compress multiple meaning in a way that visualated drama cannot. An excellent example of this is once again in Pinter's radio version of A Night Out .