26 February 2005
Saturday 26 February 2005 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan sneaks a preview of an exclusive extract from David Peace's next novel, The Damned United, which dramatises scenes from the life of the legendary footballer and manager Brian Clough, and Ken Campbell begins a new series of commissioned monologues.
Playlist
The Verb February 26th 2005
On the programme this week DAVID PEACE, one of Granta's best young British Novelists, introduces an excerpt from his current work in progress, "The Damned United" which focuses on 44 days Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United in 1974. The extract, performed on the programme by RICHARD COYLE, dramatises the incident which ended Clough's career as a player; an injury he received while playing for Middlesbrough against Bury. Even if you have no interest in football we strongly recommend this extract as a dramatic and tersely arresting piece of writing...
'The Damned United' will be published by Faber next year.
SALLY READ is a young poet whose forthcoming collection, "The Point of Splitting", moves across bodies - the bodies of the ill, the bodies of lovers - and countries, and psychological states. Waiting in someone else's room, reading their presence in its atmosphere; marvelling at another's sleeping figure; capturing the air of sinister premonition which attaches itself to firearms - Sally Read gives a mini master-class in the invisible yet tangible imprints made by bodies and objects.
"The Point of Splitting" is published by Bloodaxe.
JIBANANDA DAS was born in what was then Bengal at the end of the 19th century, and died in 1954. Overshadowed, in foreign eyes, by his compatriot, the Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, Das nevertheless commands a passionate following among Bengalis, who point to him as one of the first modernists. Clearly discernible in his work is a shift from a reverential psyche, writing intense and beautiful poems, hymns to the natural world of Bengal, to a more dislocated, questioning sensibility: modernism in feeling and form.
JOE WINTER who has translated a volume of Das' poetry, and Bengali writer KRISHNA DUTTA discuss Das, and explain why his legacy endures.
"Naked Lonely Hand", Joe Winter's translation of Das, is published by Anvil
And KEN CAMPBELL, writer, actor, performer and monologist of genius delivers a breathtakingly funny piece about Angus, one of the minor characters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Over forty years ago, Ken says, he was playing Angus in the Scottish Play. Angus has only 19 lines, but the director asked every member of the cast to write something about their character. Only now has Ken finished his essay, and it is a wild knot of conspiracy theory and speculation, in which Angus is promoted from minor messenger to the great Bard of Avon himself. Is his tiny part, Ken wonders, a consequence of Shakespeare's limited acting ability? Listen and find out...
