20 October 2005
Thursday 20 October 2005 21:40-22:15 (Radio 3)
Tanika Gupta talks to Isabel Hilton about her new play Gladiator Games which explores the events surrounding the racist murder of Zahid Mubarek at Feltham Young Offenders Institute.
Programme details
In March 2000 Zahid Mubarek, a nineteen year old Asian inmate at Feltham Young Offenders' Institute, was beaten to death by his white racist cellmate. Mubarek's family fought for four years to win a public inquiry into his death. As it heads towards reporting in February, Tanika Gupta has written a play, partly based on the Inquiry transcripts, telling the story of the case. Could this prove as powerful a piece of theatre as the dramatisation of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry? Isabel talks to Gupta, to campaigner Suresh Grover and to Mubarek's uncle about what they hope will come of the dramatisation of the case.
It's impossible to forget the euphoria of the night sixteen years ago next month when the Berlin Wall came down. So why are so many East Germans suffering such nostalgia for the old regime? Could it be that the German Democratic Republic wasn't such a tyranny after all? Mary Fulbrook joins Isabel to discuss her new book The People's State, which argues that East Germany was a dictatorship which relied on an unusual degree of involvement from the population. Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch UK takes a slightly different view.
And as part of Black History Month, Paul Goodwin pays tribute to the forgotten but influential Caribbean poet and wanderer, Claude McKay.
That's Night Waves, this evening at 9.30pm with Isabel Hilton, on BBC Radio 3.
Extra Information
Gladiator Games opened at Sheffield Theatre this evening and runs until Saturday 29 October, then at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London from 2 - 10 November.
The public inquiry into the death of Zahid Mubarek is due to report in February next year.
Mary Fulbrook's The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker is published by Yale University Press on 4 November.
