He may be one of the senior practitioners of his art, garlanded with industry awards, honorary degrees (although he turned down a
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:00AMBBC Radio 3, February 15, 10pm: A warning may have been issued against Greeks bearing gifts but one in possession of papyrus and burning ideas is as lethal. Here, Euripides, the ultimate tra…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 10:38AMBBC Radio 4, February 13, 2.15pm: Radio is the natural medium for exploring the inner life, deeply rooted impulses, the unconscious. But what if the brain has been corroded by a series of sm…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 09:47AMBBC Radio 4: It may seem superfluous casting a model as Helen of Troy on radio but Lily Cole comes as a job lot along with the original stage cast of Simon Armitage's vigorous adaptatio…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:53PMThe wireless had it all in 2014: a suburban Hamlet, electric sheep and a literal soundscape of a man’s inner workings. Moira Petty picks her highlights From the sizzle of bankers in Hell t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 02:00AMBBC Radio 3: Midwife to four decades of lustily bawling new plays, Paines Plough is not about to sit and contemplate its laurels now it is 40. Only in one respect is its anniversary producti…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:27PMPark Theatre, London: Love is all around but it's far from wet wet wet or syrupy in John Cariani's cult assemblage of a score of characters splintered by passion. Reduced from the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:20AMBBC Radio 4: Lucy Caldwell's many plays for radio and theatre poke into the dusty corners of relationships, homing in on the minutiae of betrayal, the inflections of grief, the emotiona…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 01:17PMBBC Radio 3: The shunting of Radio 3's Sunday Drama into a late night slot, and a headlong collision with bedtime for its potential audience, has been controversial, despite the amelior…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:45AMBBC Radio 4: Maxine Peake's productivity is something to behold. There was this autumn's Hamlet at Manchester's Royal Exchange and her recent foray into writing radio drama ha…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:39AMBBC Radio 3, November 16, 10pm: The shabby was too chic for some when Dublin's Abbey Theatre (in a 2011 co-production with the National) evoked the city's 1920s tenements with glis…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 10:49AMBBC Radio 4, November 6, 2.15pm: The image is striking - a gift for a dramatist and a tragedy for stowaway Jose Matada. On September 9, 2012, his body landed in leafy west London, having fal…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:56PMBBC Radio 4: All the finely-tempered production details - muted violins announcing another fearful interior monologue, German accents cleansed of hackneyed war movie associations, a whispere…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:12AMBBC Radio 4: As is acknowleged several times in this drama, the transportation of ashes, particularly when they belong to the tragic and necessarily late figure of Tony Hancock, is a subject…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:59AMBBC Radio 4: JB Books, a mythical gunfighter of the fading American West, was never going to take the long, slow road to death, but what is fascinating here is the ethical standpoint made by…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:51AMBBC Radio 4, October 20-24, 10.45am: Any number of people are on journeys in this drama: journeys to the hereafter, journeys into the past, journeys of reconciliation. Author Rachel Joyce ha…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 01:24PMBBC Radio 3: I would say that this new production celebrates the birth, 120 years ago, of JB Priestley. However, according to the hypothesis presented by JW Dunne in 1927's theoretical …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:05AMRadio drama: If eyes are the window to the soul, Elena's are as revealing to passers-by as a dormer tilted unhelpfully towards the skies. Like an old house fallen victim to a window tax…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:19AMBBC Radio 4: No actor aims to put in a wooden performance, but the temptation may be there when cast as a ventriloquist's doll. It is a trap Rob Brydon neatly sidesteps in <a href=&q…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:43AMFledgling dramatists tend to write about the familiar: mercifully, the muse visits few plumbers, so we are spared the agonies of the U-bend. Lolita Chakrabarti is also an actor, so her solo …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:39AMFledgling dramatists tend to write about the familiar: mercifully, the muse visits few plumbers, so we are spared the agonies of the
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:39AMNo genre bumps off characters as comprehensively as soap opera, nor leaves them as strangely untouched by the Shakespearean lessons of tragedy. Emmerdale vapourised dolorous Archie Brooks in…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:21AMNo genre bumps off characters as comprehensively as soap opera, nor leaves them as strangely untouched by the Shakespearean lessons of tragedy.
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:21AMThe Scottish keep Sir Walter Scott close to their hearts. He’s been on every banknote produced there since 1826, when he campaigned to allow Scottish banks to print their own money. Who kn…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:48AMAll sorts went on at Bretton Woods, the landmark 1944 monetary conference designed to prevent global fiscal meltdown. These include sado-masochistic high jinks, bouts of competitive vocabula…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:41AMLong before Chigwell was cemented in popular culture as the 1980s home of those disappointed wives, the Birds of a Feather, Dickens set much of Barnaby Rudge there, as the 1780s home of an…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 01:04PMThe Afternoon Play – as it was once known before the BBC changed it to the Afternoon Drama in a ‘chuck out your chintz’ moment – was represented in the proposed output of 20 undergro…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:17AMThe premature deaths of two literary stars, a walk-on part for Richard Burton, locations that move between Wales, Hollywood and Polynesia, and a timely find for a radio producer: these could…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:49AMShakespeare would have turned 450 this month, if he’d been cryogenically enabled, and as part of the celebrations Radio 3 poses the impudent question: Is Shakespeare’s genius beyond ques…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:01PMIs justice ever poetic? In the hands of artists and writers, maybe. In a glorious adaptation of The Divine Comedy, Stephen Wyatt takes a potshot at bankers, forced to sit forever on hot sand…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 12:47PMThe notion that a young woman might learn, slowly and painfully, to articulate her thoughts is a novel one in these days of randomly fired Twitter responses. The final, triumphal speech in A…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 01:48PM