6 December 2005
Tuesday 6 December 2005 22:00-22:30 (Radio 3)
Declan Donnellan on Dickens and Ang Lee on homosexual passion...Night Waves with Susan Hitch.
Programme details
A freezing churchyard on the Thames Estuary with dark flat marshes in the distance and a roaming wind... Few novels can match the drama of Great Expectations' opening, and that's even before two of Dickens' most famous creations, Pip and Magwitch, have really made an entrance. It's a novel which has captured the imagination of the theatre director, Declan Donnellan, and his account of Pip's journey from impoverished orphan to respectable gentleman is the centrepiece of the RSC's winter season in Stratford. In Night Waves this evening Susan Hitch asks him how he set about transforming his favourite book into a stage play and why he believes it's a story which cannot help but touch us today.
Susan also talks to another famous director, Ang Lee, who made his name with the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That early success has been repeated with Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, to mention just two of his movies. Now his latest film, Brokeback Mountain, is about to be released. It's based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, and charts the twists and turns of a love affair between two men set in the epic landscape of Wyoming.
Directors aside, this is the week that Christie's is hoping to sell three hundred examples of what it describes as "exploitation poster art". Susan tries to fathom the appeal of the genre with Tony Nourmand, one of its biggest fans, and the Times' art critic, Rachel Campbell- Johnston.
That's all in Night Waves with Susan Hitch here on BBC Radio 3 at the slightly later time of ten o'clock.
Additional information:
1) Great Expectations directed by Declan Donnellan is playing at the RSC in Stratford until Saturday 4 th February 2006.
2) Exploitation Poster Art by Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh is published by Aurum. Christie's auction is being held on Thursday 8 December.
3) Brokeback Mountain opens in the first week of January, Certificate 15.
