Long 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 …
The 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 underground̷…
The 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…
Shakespeare 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 question…
Is 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…
The 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…
The House of Bernarda Alba is one you enter at your peril. Unless, of course, you are an actor of the female persuasion. For this is that rare beast " an all-women play. The bad...
I admire the pearly prose of Elizabeth Bowen but, beyond the Anglo-Irish heritage that pervades her novels, knew little about the author who was born a Victorian and died an Elizabethan. Cer…
It's a dangerous move to make a leading character as repulsive as Joseph, the adoptive father of a Rwandan orphan in The Witness. The audience will not like him. They may think the author is…
The tweeting is incessant in Anthony Trollope's clerical drama The Warden. Rarely is a bird not in full song, the sound acting as the pastoral backdrop to enough diocesan sniping, two-timing…
As a sexy stereotype, Carmen " the lustrous gypsy strumpet in Bizet's opera " takes some beating. Luckily, along comes Dan Allum, founder of Romany Theatre Company and much-lauded Traveller …
So here comes Howard Barker, preparing to torture us with his new radio play. If you extract his own spikily anti-promotional soundbites in the manner of dubious theatre posters " drama shou…
It's enough to give Russian oligarchs a bad name. Exiled in a crumbling London mansion, Mikhail has the cultural aspirations and finesse of an extra in Geordie Shore. Transposing Dostoevsky'…
GF Newman, creator of TV's Law and Order and Judge John Deed, came to radio and caused the kind of furore normally reserved for upsets in The Archers. His 10-part gangland saga The Corrupted…
As a simulation of what his contemporaries must have felt about the doggerel verse of William McGonagall, Lucy Gannon's drama, Topaz, goes beyond mere narrative. For her play about the 19th-…
No one ever accused Lady Macbeth of a lack of ambition. Her Russian literary counterpart, though, is more of a desperate housewife from one of the darker corners of Wisteria Lane, where the …
It is 1963, sexual intercourse has just begun, according to Larkin, and staff at Private Eye are debating the issues of the day " the photos of the naked 'headless’ man produced during…
I've always had a vague idea that Three Men in a Boat, with the participants' interminable discussions of the state of their innards, renditions of unfunny jokes and constant trips to the pu…
There was always the risk that a dramatic reinterpretation of Pink Floyd's 1973 concept album, Dark Side of the Moon, would only add to 40 years worth of confusion. The record's themes of de…
The tourist authorities in Parma, north Italy, may have missed a trick. Music may be the food of love " Parma has Verdi and its famous ham and cheese " but mirror neurons, which are...
The mega-bucks licensing industry is said to have been created in 1930 when the rights to Winnie the Pooh spin-offs were sold, though the ink was hardly dry on AA Milne's whimsical bear-cent…
The Mighty Carlins sounds like a comedy acrobatic act, perhaps three men of assorted sizes and shapes being fired out of cannons and tumbling from each others' shoulders. And in a way, that …
Being sent overseas at six years old to await your marriage, at 15, to a shorter, younger, stuttering groom with undescended testicles would be enough to test the patience of any embryonic f…
The nightmares run the gamut from dystopian to fallopian in BBC Radio 4's Dangerous Visions season. Packed more tightly than battery-farmed hens into little more than a week, the dramas are …
For convincing evidence that BBC Radio 4 " not Boris Johnson's hair, rainy bank holidays or custard creams " lies at the heart of life as we know it, you have only to listen to...