English (Core) · Ch 18 — On the Face of It
About the Playwright and the Play
About the Playwright and the Play
The playwright
'On the Face of It' is the work of Susan Hill, an English writer known for fiction and drama that probes the inner lives of lonely, wounded or overlooked people. Her writing often gives voice to those who feel set apart from ordinary society — the isolated, the grieving, the disabled — and treats them with sympathy and understanding. In this play, which appears in the CBSE Class 12 English NCERT Vistas reader, she brings that same compassionate attention to two characters who are separated from the world by their physical differences, and shows how human warmth can bridge that separation.
The play — a radio play
'On the Face of It' is a radio play, that is, a drama written to be broadcast on radio and heard rather than seen. Because the audience of a radio play cannot watch the characters, everything must be conveyed through spoken words and sound. This shapes how we read it: we learn about Derry's scarred face, about Mr Lamb's tin leg, and about the garden full of ripening crab apples and buzzing bees entirely through what the characters say. The dialogue therefore carries the whole weight of the drama — the characters describe their own appearance and feelings, and their conversation is the true action of the play. The stage directions supply the sounds: birdsong, rustling leaves, apples thumping down, and finally the crash of the falling ladder.
Keeping in mind that this is a radio play helps explain why the characters speak so openly and descriptively about themselves and their surroundings — in the absence of a visible stage, the spoken word and sound effects must do all the work.
The situation
The play, set out in short scenes, centres on two very different people who meet by chance. The first is Derry, a bitter, defensive fourteen-year-old boy whose face has been badly disfigured on one side by an acid burn. Convinced that everyone stares at him in horror or pity, he has withdrawn into himself, expecting rejection and preferring his own company to the cruelty of others. One day he climbs over a garden wall and slips into what he believes is an empty place, looking for somewhere to be alone.
The garden, however, belongs to Mr Lamb, a cheerful, elderly man who has an artificial tin leg, the result of a bomb injury in the war. Far from being a bitter or broken man, Mr Lamb is warm, talkative and full of a deep love of life. He does not chase the boy away; instead he welcomes him kindly — "the gate's always open" — and begins to talk with him about the garden, the bees, the fruit, and about people and life in general.
Why the encounter matters
Out of this unlikely meeting grows a brief but transforming friendship. Mr Lamb, who has himself been mocked and set apart for his disability — children taunt him with the nickname "Lamey-Lamb" — has nonetheless chosen to embrace the world rather than hide from it. Through his warmth and his refusal to let his difference imprison him, he begins to change the way Derry sees himself and the world. Under Mr Lamb's influence, Derry starts to hope that his scarred face need not decide the whole of his life. The play thus becomes a gentle, moving study of how a positive spirit can heal the wounds that prejudice and self-pity inflict — a theme deepened by the play's unexpected, sorrowful ending.