Radio Plays XVIII
Radio Plays XVIII
Slaughterhouse-Five, or
The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut
*******An anti-war science fiction novel about World War II experiences
and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim. Billy survives
capture by the Gemans in World War II, the Dresden bombings, and the
struggle for financial success only to be kidnapped in a flying saucer
and taken to the planet Tralfamadore.
Billy is 'unstuck in time'.
Arguably one of the greatest anti-war stories of all time.
The Carpetbaggers 1.6 by Harold Robbins
The Carpetbaggers 2.6
The Carpetbaggers 3.6
The Carpetbaggers 4.6
The Carpetbaggers 5.6
The Carpetbaggers 6.6
*******Jonas Conrad inherited his father's fortune, his cunning - and his
beautiful wife. Rina Marlow's lush sexuality made her a movie goddess,
but together or apart they loved, fought and schemed in an all-out bid for success.
Starring: George Peppard, Alan Ladd (actual movie soundtrack)
Past Refrain by Jill Hyem
******a rather frightening play about Lara who hears a foreign nursery tune on the car radio,
and is terrified by it. There follows a careful investigation of her past to find the cause.
Patent Breaking Life Saving by Ben Yeoh
********Absurdist comic parable about patent laws
Pamela by Samuel Richardson 1-2 - Temptation
Pamela 2-2
******Samuel Richardson's first novel, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
was a bestseller in its time. As its heroine became an icon of feminine virtue,
so she also became the subject of vicious parody. Within its didactic account
of a servant girl who resists her libidinous master, this brilliant epistolary novel
creates high erotic and moral tension.
The Passion Flower Hotel by Rosalind Erskine
*******The story concerns a young girl going to an English girls' Boarding School. In the dormitory,
the girls discuss losing their virginity and decide that the best way is to set up a "service" for the
local Boys school situated across the lake from them. The subject is treated in a light manner.
Passion Play 1.2 by Peter Nichols
Passion Play 2.2
******Passion Play makes one feel the ugliness of deceit, the escalating anguish
that can come from loss of trust... Has an intensity of feeling, a moral scope
and a theatrical inventiveness that neither of the others matches."-The Times
The Paternity Test 1.2 by Mark Wheatley - Contact
The Paternity Test 2.2 - Proof
The Paternity Test 3.2 - Question of Proof
******"THE PATERNITY TEST strikes straight at the heart of family life now
and makes such wrenching listening that you wonder why the subject
seems scarcely to have been tackled in drama before" The Sunday Telegraph
The Pattern of Painful Adventures by Stephen Wakelam
******A new play in which Antony Sher portrays William Shakespeare.
Business is going well, but the playwright urgently needs a collaborator for his latest work.
His daughter is getting married, while his brother has a sick child and is in need of a job.
It is 1607 and Shakespeare's life is at a turning point.
The Peacock's Tail by Mark Barratt
******
People Come Here to Cry by by Sha March
******Deborah attends a local crisis centre, but is she better off without it? Humourous study of counselling,
Walter Now by David Cook
*******starring Ian McKellen as Walter, a man with learning difficulties.
Walter is now a pensioner, living alone in a hostel. His support worker puts him
forward for a house share with three other people, all of whom are half his age.
Will they accept him and will he be able to cope with independent living?
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
******War Horse follows Joey, the beloved horse of farmer's son Albert Narracott,
as he is sold to the army at the outbreak of the First World War and
shipped to France with the cavalry.
War Music by Christopher Logue (105 mins)
******In his brilliant rendering of eight books of Homer's Iliad, Logue here retells
some of the most evocative episodes of the war classic, including the death of
Patroclus and Achilles's fateful return to battle, that sealed the doom of Troy.
Compulsively readable, Logue's poetry flies off the page, and his compelling
descriptions of the horrors of war have a surreal, dreamlike quality that has been
compared to the films of Kurosawa. Retaining the great poem's story line but
rewriting every incident, Logue brings the Trojan War to life for modern audiences.
Water by Winsome Pinnock
******Water centres on an interview between a Brit-Art celebrity and a hotshot young journalist.
Della, the artist, who uses her life in her paintings, is set for superstardom; she has captured
the attention of the "Kensington Gallery" crowd by revealing her background of drug abuse
and parental suicide. But all is not as it seems. When she seduces the handsome Ed,
played by Gary McDonald, she entangles him in a web of deceit that promises to make them
both famous for their work- if he will co-operate with her hoax and put his morals to one side.
Watermark by Olwynne Macrae
******So called scientific schemes to identify and isolate child geniuses and to direct them into special programmes
where ‘exceptional intelligence is fed with exceptional knowledge’ form the basis of this work.
Chris Blackthorne is an investigative radio journalist with a well-developed conspiracy-theory mentality. He believes
there are those in the world who seek out and use people of exceptional mental ability as a means to gaining power.
Raising the Sage by Peter Roberts
*******Attempts are made to reinstate a bearded "sage" from the 1960s.
The Waves 1.2 by Virginia Woolf
The Waves 2.2
******Similar in style to another modernist work, James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel follows its six
narrators from childhood through adulthood. While Joyce's novel
could be considered a Bildungsroman, Woolf's novel is more
concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in
which multiple consciousnesses can weave together.
The Weir by Colin McPherson
******The Weir won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play for 1999.
Using his great talent to contrast the old Ireland with the new, his plays demonstrate that superstition
and greed cannot compare with real loss and human tragedy.
When We Are Married by J B Priestley
When Marnie Was there by Beaty Rubens
******A spooky tale set in an isolated village on the coast of Norfolk.
"Brooding, lonely Anna, a foster-child, goes to stay with a kind Norfolk couple.
There, like something in her memory, she finds the old house backing
on to the creek. But it is the girl at the window who haunts her ...
Marnie, headstrong, often infuriating and somehow just as elusive when the two
meet as she had been at the window. Marnie becomes Anna's perfect friend,
and although she finally vanishes for good, she has helped Anna make real friends.
"...a thrilling, intense story, part mystery, part adventure,
part fantasy, and will appeal
to girls of eleven and upward."
What Maisie Knew 1.2 by Henry James
What Maisie Knew 2.2
******This novel present James's reflections on the rites of passage
from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality.
The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes
on a distinctly modern world.
What's Stigmata? by Wally K Daly
******A well-behaved atheist finds that he has been left with the marks of The Cross...
...why has God singled him out?
OK Computer by Joel Horwood, Chris Perkins, Al Smith and Chris Thorpe.
******A man wakes up in a hospital in Berlin. He has no memory of who he is, or where he comes from.
Once the details of his life are recovered, he is repatriated to Britain and into his former life. But he is
haunted by the suspicion that this is not his real life at all.
The play celebrates Radiohead's seminal 1997 album OK Computer and draws on themes from each of its 12 tracks.
Oh! What a Lovely War by Charles Chilton
******It's a product of its Vietnam era
just as surely as Robert Altman's M*A*S*H,
and like that film Oh! What a Lovely War is ostensibly about a different war.
Based on a celebrated anti-war stage piece produced by
Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, the film chronicles
the various madnesses of the First World War.
The war is presented as the "new attraction" at the Brighton Amusement Pier,
complete with syrupy cheer-up songs, shooting galleries, free prizes
and a scoreboard toting up the dead.
Oleanna by David Mamet
******Oleanna is a two-character play by David Mamet, about the power struggle between
a university professor and one of his female students, who accuses him of sexual exploitation
and, by doing so, spoils his chances of being accorded tenure. The play's title, taken from
a folk song, refers to a 19th-century escapist vision of utopia.[
"Experiencing David Mamet's play "Oleanna" on the stage was one of the most
stimulating experiences I've had in a theater. In two acts, he succeeded in enraging
all of the audience - the women with the first act, the men with the second. I recall
loud arguments breaking out during the intermission and after the play, as the audience
spilled out of an off-Broadway theater all worked up over its portrait of . . . sexual harassment?
Or was it self-righteous Political Correctness?" Roger Ebert
The relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into
a fiendishly accurate X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship, and abuse.
The L Shaped Room 1.2 by Lynne Reid Banks.
The L Shaped Room 2.2
******Jane is unmarried and pregnant when she is turned out by her father.
She lights on a room at the top of a squalid house. She cares nothing for it,
or her neighbours. But it is these neighbours that draw her back into life -
Toby, a Jewish writer, John, a jazz player, and even her landlady.
A Resistance to Pressure by Stephen Gallagher (90 mins)
*******Contemporary thriller.
Playhouse 90 - Dead Man's Shadow by Maurice Travers
******
Craven 1.5 by Amelia Bullmore.
Craven 2.5
Craven 3.5
Craven 4.5
Craven 5.5
******DCI Sue Craven's new job starts with a new partner, DS Watende Robinson, and a burnt-out corpse.
But before the day is out her secret past starts to become a professional problem that isn't going to go away.
Cry God For Harry 1.6 - Riot and Dishonour by Martha Rofheart
Cry God For Harry 2.6 - Glorious Deeds
Cry God For Harry 3.6 - Falstaff Goodnight
Cry God For Harry 4.6 - The Tide of Blood
Cry God For Harry 5.6 - The Action of the Tiger
Cry God For Harry 6.6 - St Crispin's Day
******Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V
The Mystery of the Campden Wonder by Jeremy Potter
******The Campden Wonder was a series of events in the town of Chipping Campden that attracted
popular attention in England in the years 1660–1662.
A true and perfect account of the examination, confession, trial, condemnation and execution,
of Joan, John, and Richard Perry, for the supposed murder of William Harrison, gent. of
Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire : together with Mr. Harrison's own account of his having been
Kidnapped, and sold in Turkey : with the particulars of his return to England, after the above individuals
had been executed upon Broadway Hills, for his supposed murder.
The Revenge by Andrew Sachs
******Pioneering thriller featuring sound effects and eleven actors, but no written dialogue. From June 1978.
The Man in the Wooden Hat 1.5 by Jane Gardam
The Man in the Wooden Hat 2.5
The Man in the Wooden Hat 3.5
The Man in the Wooden Hat 4.5
The Man in the Wooden Hat 5.5
******Barrister Edward Feathers and his wife Elizabeth's lives are intertwined
with that of his hated rival, Terry Veneering, as their relationships play out from
1950s Hong Kong to present-day Dorset.
Another masterpiece from Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat,
a companion volume to the bestselling Old Filth, is written from the perspective
of Filth's wife, Betty. It is a story that will make the reader both weep and laugh
aloud, for the joy and the wit.
Jim Davis - A High Sea Adventure 1.4 by John Masefield
Jim Davis - A High Sea Adventure 2.4
Jim Davis - A High Sea Adventure 3.4
Jim Davis - A High Sea Adventure 4.4
******Jim, an orphan, is sent to live with relatives along the Devon coast. There he accidentally
witnesses the deeds of a troop of night-riders, or smugglers, and becomes caught up in their
shadowy, dangerous world of excise men, sea caves and illicit cargo. Forced to sign on for a
voyage, Jim faces hurdle after hurdle. From a skirmish with a British frigate to a nightmarish
chase on horseback to run-ins with soldiers and gypsies, the plot stays rip-roaring. Ages 9-12.
Post Mortem by Stuart Jackman
******Starring Kenneth Williams as Avril, the Angel of Death, interviewing the recently dead
before sending them on to heaven or hell.
The Smallest Man in Christendom by Robin Brooks
******
Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama by T S Eliot
******Flatmates Dusty and Doris discuss Pereira, who seems to be an unpleasant pimp but at least pays the rent.
When they cut cards, they draw the two of spades – a coffin. They have visitors: Sam, a crook, his sidekick Horsfall,
and two American friends from the war. Sweeney, a gangster figure, suggests leaving for a cannibal island where
there is only ‘Birth, and copulation, and death’. Songs about life on the island are sung, and Sweeney
tells of the brutal murder of a young woman.
One Down 1.5 by Alison Joseph
One Down 2.5
One Down 3.5
One Down 4.5
One Down 5.5
******A mystery crossword appearing in a local newspaper is more than it seems
Ottoline and Bertie 1.5 by Derek Bowskill
Ottoline and Bertie 2.5
Ottoline and Bertie 3.5
Ottoline and Bertie 4.5
Ottoline and Bertie 5.5
******The love affair between a passionate philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and the high born wife
of an MP, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Dramatised from their letters and journals
Nightworkers by Louise Doughty
******Begins with two men checking the condition of some lesser used tunnels belonging to the London Underground.
They meet a man on a similar errand but who is oddly dressed, and who speaks in the style of a century ago.
Eventually they realize that something odd has occurred...what has happened to the exits? Will they be able to
return to the surface, and, if so, what will be the year?
Ramayana of Valmiki 01.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 02.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 03.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 04.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 05.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 06.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 07.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 08.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 09.10
Ramayana of Valmiki 10.10
******The Ramayana, originally written by Valmiki, consists of 24,000 verses in six cantos
(some say seven i.e. including the Uttara Ramayana). The Ramayana tells the story of a prince,
Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon (Rakshasa) king of Lanka, Ravana.
The Valmiki Ramayana is dated variously from 500 BC to 100 BC, or about co-eval with early
versions of the Mahabharata. As with most traditional epics, since it has gone through a long
process of interpolationsand redactions it is impossible to date it accurately.
Shifting the Leaves 1.5 by Dave Sheasby
Shifting the Leaves 2.5
Shifting the Leaves 3.5
Shifting the Leaves 4.5
Shifting the Leaves 5.5
******Elizabeth Bradley stars as 80 year old Marjorie in the tale of a woman coming to terms with the past
The Slide - 1 by Victor Pemberton - Moment of Silence
The Slide - 2 Down Came A Blackbird
The Slide - 3 Analysis
The Slide - 4 Heartbeat
The Slide - 5 Danger Point
The Slide - 6 Time Limit
The Slide - 7 Out of the Darkness
******'Listen! Quiet! Everybody stand still for a minute. There's something.
Can't you hear it?' During an abnormal heatwave in March, the air becomes
thick and dull. Nothing moves - you can almost hear the silence. Something
was bound to happen...Redlow, a new town in Kent, was the dream of
self-made man, Hugh Deverill, MP. At a crowded and restless town meeting, Janet Marshall faints
due to the stifling atmosphere. She is helped by her friend Dr Ken Richards -
just as a sudden earthquake tears the room apart. A long, deep crack in a road is discovered nearby,
and powerful tremors are felt along the South Coast.When torrents of seething mud start emerging
from the fissure, scientist Josef Gomez is called in: the mud contains a special organism that can
control people's minds. And it can kill.
Smallbone Deceased 1.3 by Michael Gilbert
Smallbone Deceased 2.3
Smallbone Deceased 3.3
******A respectable firm of London solicitors becomes the scene of
suspicion and intrigue. A hermetically-sealed deed-box was never
meant to be used for storing a body and its discovery leads to the
business and social life of the firm being investigated.
The Old Curiosity Shop 01.25 by Charles Dickens
The Old Curiosity Shop 02.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 03.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 04.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 05.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 06.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 07.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 08.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 09.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 10.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 11.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 12.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 13.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 14.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 15.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 16.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 17.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 18.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 19.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 20.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 21.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 22.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 23.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 24.25
The Old Curiosity Shop 25.25
******A classic novel reissued as part of the
EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY CLASSICS series.
Telling the sentimental story of Little Nell.
The story of 'Little Nell' gripped the nation when it first appeared.
The Old Curiosity Shop tells the story of Nell Trent, a beautiful and virtuous
young girl of 'not quite fourteen.' An orphan, she lives with her maternal
grandfather (whose name is never revealed) in his shop of odds and ends.
Her grandfather loves her dearly, and Nell does not complain, but she lives
a lonely existence with almost no friends her own age. Her only friend is Kit,
an honest boy employed at the shop, and whom she is teaching to write.
Secretly obsessed with ensuring that Nell does not die in poverty as her parents
did, her grandfather attempts to make Nell a good inheritance through
gambling at cards. He keeps his nocturnal games a secret, but borrows heavily
from the evil Daniel Quilp, a malicious, grotesquely deformed, hunchbacked dwarf
moneylender. In the end, he gambles away what little money they have, and Quilp
seizes the opportunity to take possession of the shop and evict Nell and her
grandfather. Her grandfather suffers a 
breakdown that leaves him bereft of his wits, and Nell takes him away to the
Midlands of England, to live as beggars.
But that is not the end..........
An excellant adaptation by Mike Walker for the BBC, Broadcast Fri 7 Sep 2007
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