Radio Plays XXXIV
Radio Plays XXXIV
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi
******In Northern Italy is the valley of the river Po. It lies between the Po
and the Apennines and it is here that the little world of Don Camillo
can be found. The name of the actual village is immaterial as there are
countless villages just like Don Camillo’s, scattered across the region.
Stories are to be found at every field, every river and every crossroad.
The climate is always the same, never too hot and never too cold. The local
wine is the finest in all of Italy, the girls are the most beautiful, the cheese
is the most excellent, and, according to the author, even the dogs have souls.
The Little World of Don Camillo - s1e1 by Giovanni Guareschi
The Little World of Don Camillo - s1e2
The Little World of Don Camillo - s1e3
The Little World of Don Camillo - s1e4
The Little World of Don Camillo - s2e1 - Nocturne without bells
The Little World of Don Camillo - s2e2 - Men and beasts
The Little World of Don Camillo - s2e3 - Tales of the river bank
The Little World of Don Camillo - s2e4 - The fear
The Little World of Don Camillo - s3e1 - The Thirteenth-century Angel
The Little World of Don Camillo - s3e2 - The Stuff From America
The Little World of Don Camillo - s3e3 - Thunder and The Ugly Madonna
The Little World of Don Camillo - s3e4 - Don Camillo Gets Into Trouble
The Little World of Don Camillo - s4e1 - The Coup d'Etat
The Little World of Don Camillo - s4e2 - A Solomon comes to judgement
The Little World of Don Camillo - s4e4 - The wall
The Little World of Don Camillo - s05e01- Soul for Sale
The Little World of Don Camillo - s05e02- Peppone Goes Back to School
The Little World of Don Camillo - s05e03- Revenge Is Sweet
The Little World of Don Camillo - s05e04- Don Camillo Returns
The Invention of Love 1.4 by Tom Stoppard
The Invention of Love 2.4
The Invention of Love 3.4
The Invention of Love 4.4
******Take a mysterious voyage into the underworld that is also a moving and funny trip
through a great man's life. In "The Invention of Love", Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard explores
the life of classical scholar and renowned poet A. E. Housman. Old and infirm, Housman
dreams that he is dead. As Charon, the mythical boatman, ferries him across the River Styx,
Housman returns to the Oxford of his youth where he fell in love with scholarship and with
his fellow student, Moses Jackson. Stoppard's dream world includes Victorian London,
where Parliament made homosexuality a crime, and the French seashore, where Oscar Wilde -
convicted of that very crime - is living out his final days. This complex and rewarding play
weaves ideas, wit, and passion.
Hunger Again by Dermot Bolger.
******Ireland and Britain have been thrown into turmoil by a major accident at a British Nuclear power plant.
The spectre of famine is everywhere. Against this backdrop Helen Curtayne searches for her young daughter
Millie across a dangerous and altered country.
Cascando by Samuel Beckett.
******
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
******A humourous and motivating autobiography. A family moves
to Corfu, and their hilarious meetings with the local people, birds
and beasts are sure to delight the student.
Mr Loveday's Little Outing by Evelyn Waugh
******In his elegant, malicious prose, Evelyn Waugh satirizes British society as he saw it
over three decades. From Work Suspended, where Plant, a writer of detective fiction,
puts his incomplete novel in a drawer until such time as he can finish it (that is to say
after the war), to Basil Seal Rides Again, in which the hero of Black Mischief defeats
the children of the Sixties, these stories encompass much of the social milieu of the
twentieth century. The volume also includes the fragment Charles Ryder's Schooldays,
which sketches the background to the narrator of Brideshead Revisited.
Woman in Mind by Alan Ayckbourn
******Susan awakes to a man tending to her speaking
apparent gibberish, actually misheard English (such as
“Squeezy cow, squeezy” really meaning “Easy now, easy”).
He is Dr. Windsor (or “octer bin sir”), and Susan suggests
she's died and gone where no-one speaks English, and
when Bill says “December bee” (“Remember me”), Susan
retorts that there are no bees in December. When Bill's
language starts to make sense, he explains she knocked
herself out with a garden rake.
The Spaceman by Rob John
******... it's 1961. A young boy wants to meet Yuri Gagarin.
Stations to Shenfield by David Eldridge
******Every night the packed commuter train from Liverpool Street
out into Essex ferries workers home from the city.
With them go a thousand hopes and dreams.
We follow six individuals on their nightly exodus
as their stories explore the timeless themes of love death and sex.
Once Upon A Time 1.5 - The Unhappy Dragon
Once Upon A Time 2.5 - Will of the Whisp
Once Upon a Time 3.5 - Tea Time in Toy Town
Once Upon a Time 4.5 - Bird Island
Once Upon A Time 5.5 - The Nightengale
******Children's Hour
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
******The world has changed. War rages in South America and China, and Britain -
now entirely dependent on the US for food and energy - is run by an omnipresent
dictatorship known simply as The Authority. Assets and weapons have been seized,
every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraceptive
devices. This is Sister's story of her attempt to escape the repressive regime.
From the confines of her Lancaster prison cell she tells of her such for
The Carhullan Army, a quasi-mythical commune of 'unofficial' women rumoured to be
living in a remote part of Cumbria...
Lost In Space
******Why is there never enough space? Felicity Finch enters the bright, clean and remarkably peaceful
world of self-storage, with its windowless metal rooms, numbered padlocked doors and long aisles.
Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb
******Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of four French soldiers,
under General Géraud Réveilhac, executed for mutiny during World War I;
their families sued, and while the executions were ruled unfair, two of the
families received one franc each, while the others received nothing.
The novel was about the French execution of innocent men to frighten others
in their resolve to fight. The French Army certainly carried out military executions
for cowardice, as did all the other major participants. However, the central plank
of the film is the practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them
as a punishment for the sins of the whole group. This is similar to Decimation,
and while it was employed by the Romans,
it was rarely used by the French Army in World War I.
Travels With a Donkey 1.8 by Robert Louis Stevenson - Le Monastier
Travels With a Donkey 2.8 Setting Out
Sarah Siddons: Life in Five Sittings 1.5 by David Pownall
Sarah Siddons: Life in Five Sittings 2.5
Sarah Siddons: Life in Five Sittings 3.5
Sarah Siddons: Life in Five Sittings 4.5
Sarah Siddons: Life in Five Sittings 5.5
******Clare Higgins and Carl Prekopp star in this brutally honest, passionate true story
of the compelling, disturbing and tempestuous love affair between the greatest actress
of her time, the legendary Sarah Siddons and the renowned artist, Tom Lawrence.
A young teenager when he first paints Siddons, Lawrence falls hopelessly in love with her.
Plagued by self-doubts, she resists his advances. To 'escape' her clutches but also to be
nearer to her, Tom woos her daughters. When they die, Sarah accuses him of killing them
by the demonic force of his adoration. Knowing they should stay apart, over the years they
continue to meet and draw strength from each other. Every time she visits, she also sits for
Tom enabling him to trace her decline in his art. Theirs is a relationship rich in nuance and
subtlety in which two people share intimacies, aspirations, confidences, fears and doubts.
Home Coming by Veronica Coburn
******An elderly couple is brutally murdered in a cottage in Clifton. As their only son
seeks to understand their traumatic deaths the man Garda assigned to look after him
grapples with how a Nation known for a hundred thousand welcomes can allow such
a thing to happen. A story about Ireland old and new.
The Shawl by David Mamet
****** "The Shawl, " which opened to critical and popular acclaim, is about
a smalltime mystic out to bilk a bereaved woman out of her inheritance.
In his review of the New Theatre Company's presentation of "The Shawl"
in Chicago, Richard Christiansen called the play "a beautifully crafted piece
of work, with a sharp, hurting edge. . . . His [Mamet's] spinning of the yarn .
. . is ingenious, and his control of the sounds and rhythms of dialogue has
never been more awesome. . . . An exquisitely tooled chamber drama."
RNZ Drama - Moehau by Gary Henderson
******A young woman hiker – a wildlife conservation worker – lies in a psychiatric hospital,
traumatised, babbling in a language she has never learned, and refusing to open her
clenched eyes. Has she unwittingly awakened something dark, primitive and unspeakable
in the mountains and ravines of the remote Moehau Range in the north island of New Zealand?
Or has she herself committed an unspeakable crime and is feigning insanity? The Moehau stirs
up mythological undercurrents from New Zealand’s ancient past, disturbing the placid surface
of our beliefs and fears.
RNZ Drama - The Raft by Carl Nixon
******In a lakeside settlement on the West Coast, Mark and Tonia retreat to Mark’s family beach
in a last ditch effort to rescue their troubled marriage. But when Mark’s estranged parents arrive
unannounced, memories flood back and threaten to drown them all.
RNZ Drama - Piccole Storie by Craig Thaine
******At a Christchurch dance hall in the spring of 1950, Rob and June fox-trot to Glenn Miller’s
In the Mood. But memories of war interrupt the rhythm of Rob’s shuffling peacetime dance.
And there are snatches of another melody – tragic and yearning – Puccini’s Tosca.
What did they carry back from the war – those men and boys, like Rob? There was something
to be said for forgetting it all and getting on with life. But how could they, haunted as they
were by memories, not just of pain and suffering, but of pleasure, of friendship, of love?
RNZ Drama - Durham Crescent by Jo Randerson
******A young man disappears from his lodgings in Wellington leading to a frenzy of media
speculation. As the talkback hosts and news commentators speculate on the possible fate
of this quiet young loner, a trainee news reporter, Heather Wilson, assigned to retrace his
last known journey, becomes increasingly obsessed with the unfolding mystery.
Project Raphael 1.3 by Jenny Stephens
Project Raphael 2.3
Project Raphael 3.3
******A dangerous enemy agent of British Intelligence has died, taking his secrets to the grave.
The only hope of retrieving them is to send someone after him. Raphael volunteers to become
a 'revenant', a dead agent. However, once he is dead no one can contact him, and so a
ghost-hunter is recruited...
The Blue Room by Georges Simenon
******Georges Simenon is best known for the Inspector Maigret stories,
but he published scores of other books. The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), from 1963,
is believed to be one of his best.
The Blue Room is a tale of poisoned love in a village deep in rural France,
where the sinister flourishes and suspicion and claustrophobia prevail.
Tony Falcone is an ordinary guy, a self-made man, the son of Italian
immigrants. He sells and repairs agricultural machinery. He's a womaniser,
but always returns at the end of the day to his wife and daughter in the village
of Saint-Justin. Andrée Despierre is the daughter of a highly respected family.
She used to live in the local château but now she's married to Nicolas, an affluent
but sickly grocer. Tony and Andrée's passionate affair begins when he
mends a puncture for her by the roadside.
The Dancing Faun by Paul Bryers
******Kate and Janice are spending a peaceful day out in the heart of the Sussex
countryside. While looking around Berwick Church in Rodmell, Janice accidentally
bumps into an "old flame" -- a local MP. His curious behaviour arouses their
suspicion and with nothing better to do, they decide to make a few inquiries.
Then Janice disappears ...
Approx. 90 minutes
Never Come Back by John Mair
******Anti-hero on the run - Richard Hannay as a rat.
They Have Oak Trees in North Carolina by Sarah Wooley
******1986; Ray and Eileen's five year old son, Patrick, vanishes in Florida.
22 years later; Clay, a good-looking American arrives in their small village claiming
to be their missing son.A suspenseful drama about a marriage in crisis, a split-second
decision and the choices we make to try to ensure our future happiness.
Scream by Boz Temple-Morris
******SCREAM is a crime caper based on the extraordinary story behind the theft
of Edvard Munch's expressionist masterpiece from an Oslo museum in 2004.
Oslo police are closing in on David Toska, the criminal mastermind behind an
audacious cash robbery when two incompetent thieves burst into the Munch
Museum in broad daylight and ask for directions to Norway's most famous
painting. Amazingly, they emerge with two priceless paintings, The Scream
and The Madonna.
Norway's no. 1 detective is pulled off the hunt for Toska and sent after the paintings.
So begins a high profile and often bizarre game of cat and mouse as police attempt
to track down these national treasures and arrest those behind the robbery.
But things don't run smoothly for robbers or the police as both begin to adopt
increasingly unconventional tactics.
The play was written and directed by Boz Temple-Morris, in collaboration with
investigative journalist Kris Hollington, and recorded entirely on location in Olso
with many of Norway's leading actors. The exact circumstances of the recovery
of the paintings have been shrouded in mystery since 2004 though new evidence
has now emerged about the dealings between the police and their most wanted man.
Cold Comfort Farm - 1 of 4 - Flora's Rights by Stella Gibbons
Cold Comfort Farm - 2 of 4 - Amos's Call
Cold Comfort Farm - 3 of 4 - Elfine's Rights
Cold Comfort Farm - 4 of 4 - Flora's Rights Again
******Flora has been expensively educated to do everything but earn her own living.
When she is orphaned at 20, she decides her only option is to go and live with her
relatives, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort Farm. What relatives though. Flora feels
it incumbent upon her to bring order into the chaos.
The Malingerer's Manual by Gary Ogin.
******Is there ever anything you wish you could get out of? A meeting at work? Dinner with the in-laws?
A party where you know all the guests are rubbish?
Rupert needs to get out of his wedding. With the aid of the Malingerer's Manual he learns how to get
stuck in traffic, develop a cold and invent every excuse in the book and still feel guilt free.
Not that it helps him.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
******In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest
of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation
and disquiet: "Some huge irrational disaster is in the making." All around
him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the class and inheritance
that already disgust him. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, proffers the paradox,
"If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change," but Don Fabrizio
would rather take refuge in skepticism or astronomy, "the sublime routine of the skies."
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when
he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years.
E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so
beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally,
of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind
could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly
petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy."
The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live
long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable.A classic of modern fiction.
Set in the 1860s, THE LEOPARD is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying
Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
The Rough Field by John Montague
******Since its publication in 1972, The Rough Field has been praised as the most
significant attempt in poetry to understand Northern Ireland's troubled history.
The New York Review of Books called it a "kind of 'state of the nation' poem…
astonishingly successful; moving, too, and as soundly crafted as the rosewood
fiddle which seems to play with mourning sweetness in its margins."
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
******Other Brits had taken Manhattan - Alistair Cooke, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour -
so why couldn't he? Surely it would only be a matter of time before the Big Apple
was in the palm of his hand. But things did not go according to plan. Within the
space of two years he was fired from "Vanity Fair", banned from the most fashionable
bar in the city, and couldn't get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group
wanted nothing to do with him.
This is his account of the five years he spent steadily working his way down
the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy
for interactive sex toys. But it's not just a collection of self-deprecating
anecdotes: it's also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity
from inside the belly of the beast.
Top Girls 1.2 by Caryl Churchill
Top Girls 2.2
******"TOP GIRLS brings five historical female characters to a dinner party given by Marlene,
the new Managing Director of 'Top Girls' employment agency. TOP GIRLS raises difficult
questions on the nature of female success and its relation to political position, through
a fascinating mix of fantasy and reality."
All The Time in the World by Arthur C Clarke
*******A clever tale about alien art thieves who arrive to plunder earth.
A Taste of the Cat
******A Tale of Feline Allure .... and Deception
The Trouble with Lichen 1.5 by John Wyndham (2 hours 30 mins)
The Trouble with Lichen 2.5
The Trouble with Lichen 3.5
The Trouble with Lichen 4.5
The Trouble with Lichen 5.5
******The plot concerns a young woman biochemist who discovers that
a chemical extracted from an unusual strain of lichen can be used to
retard the aging process, enabling people to live to around 200-300 years.
Wyndham speculates how society would deal with this prospect.
The Employee by Sebastian Baczkiewicz
******Sebastian Baczkiewicz's dark comedy about the pressures of modern life.
Iain Adam is Head of Maintenance in the intelligent building, 'The Elm', and his life is beginning to unravel...
Seventh Dimension: Cirrus
******1. On The Seventh Day
A copy-cat school prank 30 years on goes horrifically wrong. But who's hoaxing whom?
******2. The Last of the Species Tell the Scariest Stories
A young man is seeking enlightenment, but gets more than he asked for.
******3. Money Monster
Single mum Penny finds herself up before the courts. But this is no ordinary court.
******4. Slugbucket
It wasn't bedding other women, but bedding plants that made slug-loving Colin's girlfriend walk out.
******5. The Supper Club
A dark drama with no right and wrong - only the rules of a secretive clique. Recorded on location.
Solaris by Stansilaw Lem
******Psychologist Kris has been sent on a mission to find out what has gone wrong
on a distant space exploration station. On arrival, he finds the ship deserted apart
from two scientists, both seemingly deranged.
He wakes next day to find his long dead young wife Rheya, sitting at the end of his bed...
Small Gods 1.4 by Terry Pratchet
Small Gods 2.4
Small Gods 3.4
Small Gods 4.4
******There are gods everywhere on the Discworld but only a few people can see them.
Each small god lies in wait, desperately wanting to make someone believe in him.
On the Discworld, gods need people more than people need gods.
Amy's View by David Hare
******1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment
when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit
of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of
events which only find their shape sixteen years later.
David Hare's new play, which mixes love, death, and the theatre in a heady
and original way, was sold out at the National Theatre, and transferred to the
West End in January 1998.
Judi Dench and Samantha Bond reprise their National Theatre roles.
Dead Man's Button by John Pilkington
******fun and games two hundred feet up in the cab of a crane...you've all heard of
the train driver's "dead man's handle"; in a crane there's a similar device called the
dead man's button. The story takes place on the ground and in the air.
The Beaux's Stratagem by George Farquhar
******Restoration comedy first performed in 1707.
Two beaux evolve strategies for each to marry a wealthy
wife. In the meantime they have insufficient money to
live the fashionable life, so they take turns at being
the other's manservant.
Where A Wall Once Stood by Nick Fisher
*******Wife employs a private eye to search for husband
gone missing on a trip to Switzerland and Germany.
Set in Berlin soon after the wall came down.
Islands by Judith Adams
******"Set on a mythical Iona, the play explores the conflict of love and religion -
of male and female values - in the context of the history of Saint Colomba
(AKA Crimthan - "The Wolf" and known to have been a murderer), his old lover,
now abandoned in a Nunnery, and the a wild girl child whose voice is taken."
The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
******Stevenson's famous - and influential - paradoxical tale
of the difficulty of disposing of a curse.......
Writing the Century - Once Upon A Time 1.5 by Amanda Whittington
Writing the Century - Once Upon A Time 2.5
Writing the Century - Once Upon A Time 3.5
Writing the Century - Once Upon A Time 4.5
Writing the Century - Once Upon A Time 5.5
******a touching, coming of age drama set in 1979 based on the diary of a gay teenager
living in a Nottinghamshire mining town.
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband 1.4 by Charlotte Cory - Find-the-perfect-partner
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband 2.4 - Lobster Thermidor
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband 3.4
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband 4.4
******about a middle-aged divorcee's attempts to find herself a new romantic interest
by joining an internet dating site.
Christmas Eve Can Kill You by Marie Jones
******A Lusty Comedy.
A Belfast cab driver sets out to do his Christmas Eve run. He’s young and single
and reveals that he is going to spend Christmas day in bed, pretending it is a wet
Monday, with a good novel and a six pack for company. He is increasingly convinced
that he is right as the emotional debris of Christmas floats in and out of his cab.
A bomb-scare creates mayhem in the city and the cab driver eventually has to find room
in his‘manger’ for a stranded English actor and an old lady.
We Outnumber You by Ed Hime
******A sort of Blair Witch Project in sound, a horror story built from fictional
disaster recordings. It’s by Ed Hime, directed by Jessica Dromgoole. As with
many tragedies, the starting point is one of triumph. Kenneth Cranham plays
an oil mogul, his family about him, about to launch a great venture on the Isle
of Wight, a new zoo at the centre of which stands an enormous wind turbine
and mobile phone mast, meant to promote his company’s (dubious) environmental
commitment. Two eco-terrorists penetrate the electrified perimeter fence.
Scary stuff ensues.
Thirty Minute Theatre - I'll Never Be Seven by Gilbert Leautier
******With Prunella Scales/Miranda Forbes/Crawford Logan
The Tennis Court by Jonathan Smith
******Sam and Arthur Greenwood confide in each other about everything. But in 1943 Sam is posted to India
with the 14th Army while his brother, a haemophiliac, remains at home in Kent. In April 1944 the Japanese Army
surround the British forces in the small hilltop town of Kohima and, as the two sides face each other across
the tennis court at the back of the Deputy District Commissioner's bungalow, Sam is haunted by a secret he
has not shared with Arthur.
Thirty Minute Theatre - Trouble At Hive Nine by Mike Parker
******Comical play about the life within a beehive.
When the Queen Bee (played by Thora Hird) discovers that one of her worker bees
is not working, She plans to sack him.
Why can't the bee work? Can the reason why be resolved?
Will the workers revolution happen?
The Believers by Frank Cottrell Boyce
******Liverpool, 1963. The Merseybeat boom is about to take off. And with it,
The Believers, a Christian pop band determined to spread the Word.
If only they were all singing from the same hymn sheet.
Konfidenz by Ariel Dorfman
******A marathon nine hours talking on the phone, is just one of the conversations
between a woman fleeing Nazi Germany and a mysterious stranger on the other
end of the line. He claims to be a friend of the man she has come to Paris to look
for, and he seems to know everything about her. The police arrive and take her for
questioning. By the same author as Death and the Maiden, with the same density
of tension and unuttered threat.
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