23 June 2005
Thursday 23 June 2005 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Isabel Hilton and guests with a first night review of Peter Brooks' play Tierno Bokar, based on the life of a Sufi mystic.
Programme Details
The latest work from the acclaimed theatre director, Peter Brook, finds him exploring the life and teachings of an African Sufi sage called Tierno Bokar. The play is created from stories by the Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba and tells of a more mysterious Africa that is "traditional, animist, impregnated with Islam, shaken by colonialism and torn apart by internal strife". This eagerly awaited new work is showing at the Warwick Arts Centre from where Jameela Saddiqi offers a first night review.
Anna Akhmatova is one of the greatest poets of Russian literature and one of the most colourful and tragic figures to emerge out of the turmoil of the early 20th Century. Her poems deal with love and romantic yearning - often in response to her lovers and three husbands and to the brutality of the times. Her first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks, she was silenced by Stalin and her son was sent to a Siberian labour camp. The poet and novelist Elaine Feinstein has written a new account of Akhmatova's vivid life and discusses her poetry on tonight's Night Waves.
Also on the programme - the latest in the series of letters in which writers describes the influence of landscape on their work, Michael Morpurgo celebrates the presence of the West Country in his writing. And the journalist James Meek describes his first novel -The People's Act of Love - a bold and hugely imaginative work set in the wilds of Siberia where a strange and violent group of individuals come together with sinister results.
Night Waves, presented by Isabel Hilton, at 9.30pm.
Presenter: Isabel Hilton
Producer: Anthony Denselow
