BBC RADIO 3 NEW SEASON 2015/16 PRESS PACK CONTENTS Arts and Drama Classical Digital New Talent World and Jazz For more information contact [email protected] / 020 361 43888 1 ARTS AND DRAMA Harriet Walter © Georgie Oetker David Suchet, Zoe Wanamaker & Howard Davies © BBC Guy Levy Between the Ears: We Are Writing A Poem About Home Poet Kate Clanchy presents a special Between the Ears as part of Contains Strong Language, a season of poetry and poets across the BBC to mark and celebrate the 21st birthday of National Poetry Day in October. Some poets like woods. Some poets like cliffs. Kate Clanchy likes schools: in particular the small, extremely diverse, and often challenging Oxford comprehensive where she has been working for the last seven years. A school which still looks and sounds like the grammar school it once was - until you look closer and see there are more black faces than white, that most of the cricket team comes from Bangladesh, and that as they have fifty-four languages between them - Latvian, Nepalese, Hungarian, Kiswahili, Ibo and six kinds of Arabic - the kids have decided to speak English in the idiom of Kanye West – even if they are Lithuanian. This is a community without a majority culture: a place where, as no one is really sure of the right way to do things, eccentricity and creativity flourish. Between the Ears takes listeners into Kate’s poetry workshop to meet its multi award-winning young poets. Listen – as together they create a radio poem about home: the homes and home countries they came from, and the new homes they have found, and the home they are making in their school and in their writing. “My poem will be a rock concert with no perfect edits, no careful straining through a BBC sieve, and no volume knob…” 2 Listen: this is school. The world is here, but School is still school. The cold, stone stairs scream at the bell. the gym bars swing back, the books thud shut. The field is torn with balls and cries, is bright with leaves with scarves laid down for goal – Come inside. The library. Listen, our pens scratch. We are writing home “My poem is a jack fruit, the smell of it clings…” “I may have been small/ but when trapped in the claws of war, my voice could soar – “ “I can’t write about my Hazara people…” “My poem is my country, my home country – and my country is poor…” “I have been a boat, a plane, a migrant, an angry bird in a game…” Listen – this is England singing. With poems from Robert Seatter and Asfa Awad. TX: 10 October 2015 Producer: Jonquil Panting Arthur Miller Centenary As part of celebrations across BBC Radio 3, 4 and 4 Extra, Radio 3 marks the centenary year of one of the most important American playwrights of the 20th century with a season of dramas, documentaries and reflections on Arthur Miller’s huge influence in theatre, 100 years since his birth. Sunday Feature: Arthur Miller - Speaking Of New York Arthur Miller was a New Yorker. In his formative years he shared the city's pain during the Depression as his family lost its wealth and moved from glossy Manhattan to a small house in Brooklyn. Ben Brantley, chief theatre critic of the New York Times, is on location in the city to examine Miller's debt to his home town. New York offered Miller the vivid treasures of its characters, its language and gave the young writer a moral purpose that informed his work throughout his life. Brantley visits the Millers' old house in Brooklyn – surely the model for Willy Loman’s home in Death of a Salesman – and is down on the docks to consider the inspiration of stories from the Sicilian community that became A View from the Bridge. He interviews Joan Copeland, Miller's 94-year-old sister, who is the marvellous keeper of the story of their early life and of the family's lost wealth during the Depression years, and also speaks to Miller's son Robert who produced the film of his father's novel 'Focus' which records anti-Semitism in New York in the post war years. TX: 11 October 2015 Producer: Susan Marling, Just Radio 3 Drama on 3: Death of a Salesman David Suchet, Zoe Wanamaker and director Howard Davies, who all won awards for the sell-out production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons in the West End in 2010, reunite to create a new production for Radio 3 of Miller’s 1949 classic about the American dream and his second big Broadway success. The original production won The Pullitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award and Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. Willy Loman (David Suchet) is a 63-year-old travelling salesman worn out by a life on the road. His wife Linda (Zoe Wanamaker) has supported him throughout and borne him two sons, Biff and Happy. Biff is working away and has returned home for the first time in years, so the whole family are reunited. But there is a secret between Willy and Biff, which has destroyed what was a mutual hero-worshipping relationship when Biff was a star athlete in High School, and still haunts them both. TX: 11 October 2015 Director: Howard Davies Producer: Chris Wallis, Watershed Productions The Essay: Staging Arthur Miller To mark the centenary of Arthur Miller’s birth, playwrights, directors and an actor, reflect on what his work means to them and describe their personal connection with the playwright and his work. Monday: Director Richard Eyre begins the series with a set of personal recollections of the playwright. He recalls conversations with Arthur Miller about the House Un-American Activities hearings; the first production of Death of a Salesman and his experience of directing The Crucible on Broadway. And he reflects on Miller’s impact on British theatre. Tuesday: Actor Margot Leicester who has performed in many Arthur Miller plays writes about the deep personal connection she feels with his characters; recalls her experiences of working in the rehearsal room with Miller; and the process as an actor of, in Miller’s words, ‘making the lines land.’ Wednesday: Emmy award-winning screenwriter Ron Hutchinson who recently adapted Arthur Miller’s unproduced screenplay The Hook, for the stage writes about the process of working with Arthur Miller’s drafts and handwritten notes to ‘get inside his writing head word by word’ and examines the sheer potency of Miller’s technique. Miller wrote The Hook in 1951 but withdrew it from production when the studios demanded politically motivated changes, which he refused to make. Thursday: British director David Thacker writes about his close friendship and working relationship with Arthur Miller. He reflects particularly on working with Miller on the script for ‘Broken Glass’ for its British premiere in 1994. Friday: Tony Kushner is a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter who knew Arthur Miller and has recently edited Miller’s Collected Plays. He reflects on the importance of Arthur Miller in American theatre. TX: Monday 12 – Friday 16 October 2015 Producer: Caroline Hughes, Whistledown Productions Drama on 3: A View from the Bridge Martin Jarvis directs Arthur Miller's 1955 award-winning masterpiece, recorded specially in the US for Drama on 3 with Alfred Molina leading an all-star American cast. 4 Universal themes of family, guilt, loyalty, sexual attraction, jealousy - and love - in a powerful story about illegal immigration that still resonates to our time 60 years later. Set in an Italian-American neighbourhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York in the 1950s, lawyer and narrator Alfieri (Hector Elizondo) confides to listeners there are cases where he can only watch as they run their ‘bloody course’. Longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Alfred Molina) lives with his wife Beatrice (Jane Kaczmarek) and her orphaned niece, Catherine (Melissa Benoist), in a Brooklyn tenement. He has a love of, almost an obsession with, 17 year old Catherine. Beatrice's Italian cousins are being smuggled into the country. The family hide the illegal immigrants, Marco (Reid Scott) and Rodolpho (Matthew Wolf), while they work on the docks. Eddie's increasing suspicion and jealousy of Rodolpho's developing relationship with Catherine ('he ain't right, he cooks, he sings, he makes dresses') eventually leads to betrayal and a tragic confrontation. TX: 18 October 2015 Director: Martin Jarvis, Jarvis and Ayres Productions Producer: Rosalind Ayres Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival of Ideas 2015 This year BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of ideas returns to Sage Gateshead from Friday 6 November – Sunday 8 November 2015 for a weekend of provocative debate, new ideas, live music and performance. Now in its tenth year, the Festival brings together high-profile figures from the worlds of arts, science, politics and literature to discuss and challenge current thinking on a range of topics, this year focusing on a theme of ‘Tearing Up The Rule Book’, exploring why the idea of rule-breaking has become so attractive to business, politics, culture and other areas of public life – and asking which of our rule books need to be kept firmly intact. World on 3, Sunday Morning, Jazz Records Requests, and the Early Music Show will broadcast from the festival for the first time bringing more music programming at the Festival than ever before, with many of Radio 3’s regular programmes broadcast live from the Radio 3 pop-up studio on the concourse of Sage Gateshead. This year’s opening Free Thinking Lecture will be given by American poet Claudia Rankine, just announced as winner of the 2015 Forward Poetry Best Collection prize.