27 October 2005
Thursday 27 October 2005 21:40-22:15 (Radio 3)
In tonight's Night Waves, a first night review as Oscar-nominated actress Kristin Scott Thomas returns to the stage as a sleazy night club singer who's lost her memory in Pirandello's revolutionary play As You Desire Me.
Programme details
In Night Waves tonight, Oscar-nominated film star Kristin Scott Thomas returns to the London stage as a sleazy Berlin night-club singer who has lost her memory and is in thrall to a crude but successful writer played by Bob Hoskins. The play is 'As You Desire Me' by Luigi Pirandello, who revolutionised world theatre after the trauma of the first world war by questioning all our assumptions about identity. Night Waves will have a review straight after tonight's opening.
Memory is also at the heart of Brian Dillon's new book 'In the Dark Room'. After the death of both his parents when he was barely out of childhood, he examines the emotional and cultural question of how memory works, allied to objects they owned, the house in which they lived and the exploration of artists from Rachel Whiteread to Proust. Brian Dillon is a studio guest tonight.
Memory and especially new-found evidence are prominent in a new German film - 'Sophie Scholl: the Last Days' - which tells the story of the interrogation and fate of the only female member of The White Rose, a student resistance movement hoping to achieve the downfall of Adolf Hitler and the ending of the second world war after the battle for Stalingrad. Karen Leeder reviews it.
And with the cuts proposed by the BBC's World Service to ten of its foreign language radio services (mostly in Eastern Europe), we have a major discussion about the BBC's legacy and health of public service broadcasting in these fledgling democracies. Can it, should it expect to survive under its own steam?
That's all on Night Waves with Paul Allen at 9.40 tonight here on BBC Radio 3.
Additional details:
Sophie Scholl, certificate PG, is released on 28 October at selected cinemas nationwide.
'In the Dark Room' by Brian Dillon is published by Penguin.
'As you Desire Me' is on at the Playhouse theatre in London until 22 January 2006.
