9 January 2006
Monday 9 January 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
On Night Waves tonight, Matthew Sweet explores the dark history of the 'forbidden experiment'. Plus an interview with the artist Richard Long, Soviet photography, and a novel by a playwright about the silent cinema...
Programme details
On Night Waves tonight, Matthew Sweet ventures into the dark history of the 'forbidden experiment' - the deliberate long-term isolation of children with the aim of discovering truths about human nature. Why have human beings, from Ancient Egypt onwards, been drawn to such a cruel test?
Richard Long has carved out distinctive terrain for himself by making art from his walks through the landscape, and photographing the sculptures - often arrangements of stones - that he makes along the way. Matthew meets him as he prepares a new exhibition of his work.
The plays of Luigi Pirandello have undergone something of a renaissance in British theatre recently, providing lead roles for the likes of Iain McDiarmid, Bob Hoskins and Kristin Scott-Thomas. But Pirandello also wrote novels, including 1926's Shoot! , which he set in the world of the early cinema as he knew it. The writer William Boyd joins Matthew to discuss a novel by a playwright about the movies...
And with the opening of an exhibition of photographs from what was once a leading Soviet photo agency, Charlotte Hobson joins Matthew to discuss the ways the USSR constructed an image of itself, from peasants fascinated by a light-bulb to children making munitions in the Great Patriotic War.
Click here to view Night Waves' Soviet Times Gallery.
Additional information:
Richard Long's exhibition, The Time of Space, is at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in central London until 10 February.
Shoot! by Luigi Pirandello, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is published by the University of Chicago Press on 16 January.
Soviet Times is at the Imperial War Museum North until 4 June.
Kunal Basu's novel Racists is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson on 19 January.
