Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in Dramatisations

In this BBC full-cast production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena run to the woods and stumble into a life separate from time itself. Fairy magic wreaks havoc and midsummer madness takes over as lovers tread the delicate line between fantasy and reality...

Joss Ackland, Roger Allam and Leslie Phillips star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel. When poverty drives Jean Valjean to steal a loaf of bread from a baker’s window, it is an action that will haunt him for the rest of his life. A citizen of...

In this BBC full-cast production, a trio of witches predicts Macbeth's early demise. In a tale of fate, fulfilment and ego, Macbeth and his wife desire the Scottish kingship. Macbeth's temptation and descent into evil, his wife's ruthlessness and subsequent madness and the overarching presence...

An alternative history of the US space programme, dramatised by Dirk Maggs. What if John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and developed the space programme? President Nixon, with the help of former president JFK, has just green-lit NASA’s first manned expedition to Mars. Aboard the expedition is Natalie York, a geologist who risks everything she loves for the chance to go to space; Phil Stone, former X-15 test pilot; and Ralph Gershon, a Vietnam War hero intent on being the first African American to reach another planet.

In this BBC full-cast production of Romeo And Juliet, the two star-crossed lovers fight for each other until their dying breath. Can their two feuding families reconcile? With the intimacy of radio, the full beauty and meaning of some of the most lyrical lines ever written can be truly heard...

David Tennant stars as Malvolio in Shakespeare's comedy of disguise, madness and love. One of Shakespeare's happiest plays, Twelfth Night is both a comedy of misrule and a trenchant attack on puritanism. Disguise and deceit leads to misadventure, madness and mistaken love. Orsino loves Olivia...

Carla Lemarchant was a child of five when her mother was accused and convicted of poisoning her father, the famous painter Amyas Crale. After Caroline Crale dies in prison, Carla is sent to live with her uncle and aunt in Canada. Only on her twenty-first birthday does Carla learn of her family...

Lily Cole stars as Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, in Simon Armitage’s vivid, visceral adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. For 10 years, the Greeks have been laying siege to Troy to win back their abducted queen, Helen. But as the war drags on, and the battlefields run scarlet with blood, the opposing forces are entrenched in a bitter stalemate. As gods and mortals squabble amongst themselves for the spoils of war, the exhausted warriors go to extreme lengths in a desperate grab for victory....

A deliciously black satirical comedy about the dinner party from hell. The fastidious host, Paige, decides to throw a dinner party in honour of her husband, Lars, who is celebrating the success of his pop psychology book, Beyond Belief. She carefully plans a surprise menu that will mark the occasion and anxiously checks with the waiter she has employed to make sure that everything is perfectly prepared. Her lucky guests include a postfeminist vegetarian artist, a distinguished microbiologist, a TV journalist and an uninvited guest who ends up staying for dinner.

A comic and heart-warming play about teenager Michael Croxley. Michael's stammer has contributed to his fear of public speaking. But then the girl he adores, Lynne Hargreaves, reads a composition of his in double English, and discovers he's a whizz with words and his spelling is stupendous. When she asks him to be part of the school spelling-bee team, how can he refuse? He accepts gallantly.

One of a series of plays by British screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce looking at the punk generation three decades on, with each play telling a different, but connected, story. In Parallel Lines, Julie is a singer in an ageing Blondie tribute band. An invitation to the reunion of the audience at an Adverts gig in 1977 brings some skeletons dancing from the cupboard. Starring Doon Mackichan as Julie, with Sian Reeves, Rosie Cavaliero, Ivan Kaye, Paul Viragh, Joseph Tremain, Sarah Bedi, John Rowe and Ben Crowe.

Jenny Eclair and Julie Balloo return with a second series about being an 'older' mother. Cass Mason is finding motherhood age 47 tough. She barely has time to blog with a new baby who won't sleep; she fears she may be turning into a zombie. Not only does Cass have to deal with Florence, the rest of the family aren't much help. Will Ken ever get a job, will her designer-clad sister even offer to hold a drooling baby and are her two grown children really contemplating moving back home?

Here is a collection of Shakespeare's most inspiring speeches from the BBC Sound Archives. Hear timeless soliloquies from Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, and The Merchant of Venice, memorably delivered by some of the leading actors of the 20th century.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast production of one of the earliest plays by Alan Bennett. The 1970s are a time of change, but Labour MP George Oliver feels stuck in one place: distrusting the ‘mawkish mentality’ of the young and fearing the encroaching life of the middle-aged, with little to look forward to but the imminent end of a not-very-interesting road.