Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Playwright best known for political plays including 'Destiny', 'That Summer', and a trilogy about the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
On the island
Eight records
Royal Shakespeare Company and the John McCarthy Singers
Well the first record is from Nicholas Nickleby, and it's I think Stephen Oliver's Incidental Music for Nicolas Nickleby is by a writer who's written the best incidental music for theatre since Mendelssohn. And I think it's just a wonderfully sustaining piece.
I think if you uh if you passed into adulthood anywhere between Love Me Do and Let It Be, it would be perverse not to choose a Beatles track. And I've chosen what I think is the first uh Beatles single after they started getting number ones not to be number one, which is Strawberry Fields Forever.
Mass in B minor, BWV 232: Gloria in excelsis DeoFavourite
Leipzig Radio Choir and Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Peter Schreier
At my boys' public school, one of the features was that they did oratorios and there was a cycle of them. And if you stayed for five years, which I did, you would get the same one at the end of the beginning. And I sung, in fact, the B minor Mass twice. The second time as a bass, but the first time as an alto.
I picked the Martin Luther King I Have a Dream speech because A, it's a wonderful piece of rhetoric. I think it's the best speech of the 20th century, but also it's about the civil rights movement to desegregate the South, which I think is a model political movement which brought together lots of people from very disparate backgrounds in a common cause and up against very considerable odds.
I like folk rock. I you know, this is a confessional programme, and Steel Life Spanish is my favorite group, and they did a a version of of the traditional Gao Wasser, which I've chosen chosen partly because I once had the original version in a play, but mainly because I feel on a desert island I would need Christmas, and this would give me Christmas.
Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93: II. Allegro
Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne conducted by Dmitri Kitayenko
Number six, talking of political commitment, is Shostakovich, who had a very complicated relationship with the Soviet Union and his attempts to be a good Soviet artist, but his also attempts not to compromise his own art in so doing. And I think that that tension produced some very wonderful symphonies. I've chosen the Tenth and the Second Movement, which has a wonderful kind of jazzy, drumbeat-y energy.
Original Broadway Cast of West Side Story
Well, record number seven is a great antidote to left-wing romanticism, which is Geoff is a Krupke from Westside Story, the American musical, one of the great theatrical inventions of the 20th century, and Westside Story being incomparably the greatest. It's sometime at his most muscular best as a lyricist before he went cute. And it's about a series of spurious excuses for young criminal behaviour, and therefore, as I say, a great antidote to romanticism.
Meditation on Dvořák's Slavonic Fantasy
I wanted something that I discovered recently and I bought this C D because I thought that my partner Stephanie might like it and she took one look at the C D cover and said, you bought this, it's a violinist called Sophie Sullivan, you bought this because she's gorgeous and I said I reject this calumny. So this is a meditation on Vorjak's Slavonic fantasy and it's played by one gorgeous woman I don't know to remind me of another one who I do.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:39Is it more difficult to write political theatre these days, now that politics is less divisive?
I I think it it it was. I think politics came back with the vengeance with nine eleven really, when when people suddenly reali were reminded that politics could kill. I think that for twenty years you know the remit of politics had reduced. But I think generally you're right. I think the last thirty years have have seen a d decline in the power of the public realm in general.
Presenter asks
5:03When you were asked to adapt Nicholas Nickleby by Trevor Nunn, you hadn't read the book, is that right?
Well, I kind of he rang up and explained why the RSC wanted and I was in America at the time, so dramatic transatlantic call. And then he said, oh, it's down to Nicholas Nickleby or our mutual friend. Think about it and I'll call you back. And I then rang my wife Eve, who was in England... and said, is Nicholas Nickleby the one with Mrs. Gamp in it? And it isn't. And she explained patiently the two novels and said, I should do it if it's our mutual friend and don't do it if it's Nickleby... And then Trevor ran back and before I could start on my pitch, he said, by the way, we've decided it's Nicholas Nickleby. And so I read it, I read half of it, it's very long, on the plane on the way home and in this particular case decided not to follow Eve's advice. And I entered a rehearsal room with 40 actors and two directors and a stage management team to start working on it, more unprepared for any project than I had ever been before or ever intend to be again, absolutely.
The keepsakes
The book
Brian Keenan
the book is a book about being on your own, and it's Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling, which is his remarkable story of being a hostage in Beirut. And I do it because A, it would be nice to realise that there was somebody worse off than you are, but also because it really does demonstrate that if you're deprived, and particularly if you're deprived of other human contact, you can find things in yourself which, A, make you survive, but also that you can plumb pretty extraordinary depths and perhaps find things that weren't even there before. And so it would be, I think, an inspiration as well.
The luxury
my luxury, oddly enough, Brian Keenan mentioned that one of the things he'd really like was the piano. I don't think being on the desertine should preclude normal human impulses. And my sister is a musician, and I think sibling rivalry should be maintained under all circumstances. So I'd like to learn to play the piano.
Presenter asks
15:27Why did you, from this leafy Edgbaston, Conservative background, take to radical student politics with such strength?
Well, who knows? I do think being at a perfect school does give you certain resentments and so on against authority which hold you in good stead in years to come. But I've always been a bit unhappy with that. And I wrote a play about people who defect from left to right in later life called Maydays. And it was partly as a sort of self-exploration. And the central character was partly based on speculation as to how would I move from left to right. And I wrote that in order to try and avoid doing it, really.
Presenter asks
18:46How much influence would you suggest your play Destiny had on political thinking at the time?
Well, I think it did have a bit as part of something else. I mean, it was part of a general campaign against the the rise of the National Front, who really from nineteen seventy five onwards were beginning to get quite high votes... There was a campaign by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism and a number of other groups to persuade people that they were in fact a neo-fascist party. And Destiny was part of that, and I think contributed to that. And the result of that was that we did persuade the British public of that fact, and Britain didn't have a serious far-right movement for 25 years as a result.
Presenter asks
23:27Was the collapse of Communism in 1989 dispiriting for someone with your beliefs?
Well, I did think it was important. I mean, quite a lot of people, I think, had never taken the Soviet Union very seriously and thought that, you know, a third of humankind were living in some kind of aberration and that there was something called true socialism which had never existed. And I'd increasingly during the 80s thought that wasn't a sensible view to hold. So when the wall came down, I felt I had to kind of confront that and write about it. And I'd written a series of three plays, which are about Eastern Europe after the wall came down, in order to try and make sense of it.
Presenter asks
26:54How did the death of your wife Eve from cancer change the way you look at the world?
Well it it it was an ex extraordinarily profound experience. I mean it was about seven months. We had the diagnosis in the summer and she died the the following March. And I think the you know you discovered things about each other that you had either forgotten or perhaps never knew or perhaps weren't even there before. I mean I think you kind of rise to that. And, you know, Eve was a demanding and sometimes imperious woman and surprise, surprise, that those characteristics didn't disappear when she discovered she'd got terminal lung cancer. But what she didn't have was she didn't have any martyrdom, she didn't have any self-pity and she wasn't in denial. And the absence of those three things, I think, is a pretty good definition of courage under those circumstances.
“I think the the big theme of what I've always written is is about uh the gap between ideals and reality, and I think that that will never go away.”
“I'm a snooker player. I like striking one ball and hitting another six.”
“I think the Communist experiment absolutely has failed. I think that the ideals and dreams which gave rise to it have not failed, and I think continue to be remarkably resilient considering what's happening in the world.”
“Eve was the one that was dying, and I was the person who was... running the ship and riding side saddle, and I was sort of dealing with doctors and so on. And, you know, there is a point, I mean, the night before she died, and I was trying to calm her down about something which she was justifiably annoyed about. And she said, I do have a right to my anger. And I think that was a moment of saying, you know, back off, David. You know, there are some things that can't be sorted, including the fact that I'm about to die.”