012 – Footnotes 1
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This episode is a selection of the Footnotes that we’ve compiled during the research and conversations that we’ve had so far on the podcast. It is a recorded smorgasbord of fragments, with titbits of information in the best tradition of footnotes, as well as additional observations of my own on each play. So if you’re interested in:
- How many copies of A Doll’s House were sold when it was first published
- Who Tennessee Williams chose as his favourite writer(s)
- What Samuel Beckett thought of the Lord Chamberlain
- Why lipstick is important to the mothers of Aberfan
- Where Shakespeare’s real life inspiration for The Tempest came from
- The significance of the island of Torcello to Robert and Emma in Pinter’s Betrayal
- How an Icelandic volcano lay behind Duncan Macmillan’s meditations about climate change in Lungs
- Why Peggy Ashcroft felt naked as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea
- How going to work on an egg might turn you into a footballer rather than a famous cook
- What the “beholders’ share” is, or
- Where the “pesto triangle” is
among many other trivial and profound footnotes, join me for our ragbag review of the plays that we’ve talked about over the past eleven episodes.
PS You are of course also welcome to read the full set of Footnotes for each episode here on the website.
You might also be interested in …
063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
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