68 stories by "Moira Petty"
He may be one of the senior practitioners of his art, garlanded with industry awards, honorary degrees (although he turned down a
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
The 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 to …
BBC 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…
Park 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 …
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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…
BBC 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 …
Radio 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…
BBC 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…
Fledgling dramatists tend to write about the familiar: mercifully, the muse visits few plumbers, so we are spared the agonies of the
Fledgling 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 …
No genre bumps off characters as comprehensively as soap opera, nor leaves them as strangely untouched by the Shakespearean lessons of tragedy.
No 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…
The 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 know…
All 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…
