Season highlights: Drama
Season highlights: Drama
Published: 22 September 2016
Thursday 29 September
Celebrating seventy years to the hour that the Third Programme was launched, Robin Brooks' deliciously lyrical comedy romps through the first hours of the pioneering station's life, in fact and fantasy. 1946. A new government and the NHS. The first Festival of British contemporary music. Peter Grimes. De-mobbed servicemen and young working-class beneficiaries of the Butler Act are crowding into university. And in a Blitz-battered Broadcasting House, chosen head George Barnes (1st in History, Kings) and his Director-General William Hayley (no university education) meet to discuss a new arts network, Programme C, (after A - Light - and B - Home) to pull up the cultural life of the nation by its bootstraps.
The cast includes Pippa Bennett-Warner as Katherine, the Herald, Pip Torrens as George Barnes, and Trystan Gravelle as Gwylim Jones.
Drama on 3: Radio Beckett
Sunday 2 October
Matthew Sweet presents an evening of radio plays by Samuel Beckett, with Stephen Rea and Ian McKellan. Newly recorded in binaural sound as part of Radio 3’s 70th season.
Like no other dramatist, Beckett’s works capture the pathos and irony of modern life. In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio, including the BBC's Third Programme. These plays are suffused with a musicality which, though evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly remarkable in this medium. They are concerned with human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication.
The plays will give a great insight into the development of Beckett’s style and into his approach to sound. Increasingly different in tone and conception from his stage work, the radio plays become more abstract as characters become less individualised and more representative.
From an Abandoned Work: performed by Stephen Rea
Rough for Radio 1: performed by Ron Cook and Monica Dolan
Rough for Radio 2: performed by Stephen Dillane, Louise Brealey, Brian Protheroe and Nick Underwood
Words and Music: performed by Ian McKellen and Carl Prekopp
Cascando: Performed by Stanley Townsend and David Seddon
Drama on 3: The Visa Affair
Sunday 9 October
Writer Jake Arnott has uncovered a previously unpublished story by Joe Orton, who in 1965 visited the American Embassy in London to get a visa to attend the Broadway production of his outrageous West End hit ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’ and was caught up in a Kafkaesque world of oppression and paranoia. This story becomes the heart of a new drama, in which Arnott also draws on letters, archive, newspaper reports and personal testimony to create a darkly comic drama revealing Orton’s life and the world that he lived in. Orton's first commission as a playwright was from Radio 3's predecessor the Third Programme in 1964.
The cast includes Russell Tovey as Joe Orton, Tom Burke as Kenneth Halliwell, Alison Steadman as Miss Boynes and Frances Barber as Peggy Ramsey. Directed by Marilyn Imrie.
Between the Ears: Tower of Babel
Saturday 19 November
A newly commissioned work for radio from globally renowned theatre director and artist Robert Wilson which has been co-produced by the BBC and a series of German radio stations. In this multilingual play about the doomed proverbial tower of Babel, half a dozen languages are interwoven and juxtaposed. Wilson, originally an architect, has for decades worked worldwide with international ensembles, in various cultures and languages, and at constantly changing locations, all merging into a single whole: the theatre. He uses texts from an ancient description of the city of Babylon and passages from the great works of theatre history: Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine and Ionesco. Featuring actors and musicians including Fiona Shaw, Alan Cumming, Daniel Hope and architect Daniel Liebeskind.
Drama on 3: The Birthday Party, by Harold Pinter
Sunday 20 November
Harold Pinter was one of the writers championed by the Third Programme – and in the late 1950s commissioned one of his early plays before he had his first stage hit. Pinter himself acknowledged the role the Third had had in his own cultural education. For the 70th anniversary, Drama on 3 presents a new production of The Birthday Party from 1957, now considered a Pinter classic, but which on its first London opening, only lasted a week.
Stanley, a former pianist lives in a dingy seaside boarding house run by Meg and Petey. Two sinister strangers turn up - Goldberg and McCann. They claim to know him from the past. They turn Stanley's birthday party into a menacing and terrifying encounter and eventually frog march him away to an uncertain fate.
