22 April 2006
Saturday 22 April 2006 22:20-23:00 (Radio 3)
The body of a boy is washed up on a beach. Was it a fishing accident? Or was it murder? What unfolds is a haunting short story especially commissioned for The Verb in which the Nigerian born writer Segun Afolabi explores the role of blame in our societies today. He talks about the art of the short story with Ian McMillan and guests.
Programme Details
To be or not to be, that is the point. Shakespeare, but not necessarily as you would like it. Sam West and Shakespeare scholar Ann Thompson discuss different versions of the greatest Dane: Hamlet the character and Hamlet the play.
There is no manuscript of what is often claimed to be the richest play in the English language. Directors have a choice of two quartos and a folio version. A 'complete' Hamlet with all the material included would run for well over four hours. In different texts the famous soliloquies occur at different points of the plot. So how do directors decide what to cut, what to add and what to move? As a new book publishes all three versions of the play, Ian McMillan goes in search of the melancholy Prince, with the help of an arresting performance by Sam West.
There is also a new short story from Caine Prize winner Segun Afolabi, together with an examination of new currents and rewards in modern short story writing. Good news, at last, for short story writers. Prizes, anthologies, magazines and even publication in a tabloid newspaper are now available to those who can master this subtle and powerful form. It has long been said that there were far more short story writers than readers - but is this changing? Louise Doughty, writer and short story judge, and Segun Afolabi debate.
And legendary radio producer Piers Plowright explains his feelings about poems made with tape recorders and fragments of words and sounds. Is it just a lot of odd noise, or were the artists and poets who gathered around microphones in the 1960s to hoot, whistle and hum really on to something - worthy heirs of Tristian Tzara and the Dadaists?
A Caine Prize winner, a wise Dane scholar, and something called The Whississippi (yes, it's a river of whispers). It could only be The Verb with Ian McMillan, at 10.20pm here on BBC Radio 3.
Additional Information:
A Life Elsewhere by Segun Afolabi is published by Jonathan Cape
Don't Know A Good Thing: The Asham Award Collection edited by Kate Pullinger is published by Bloomsbury
Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 and Hamlet: The Second Quarto Text (1604-1605) edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor are published by The Arden Shakespeare
Text-Sound Compositions - A Stockholm Festival is out in Sweden on the Fylkingen Records label
Producer: Horatio Clare
