Showing results for "The Performance" in Genre Fiction

Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn". One hundred years after its author’s death, this classic remains remarkably modern and poignantly relevant. In this new edition, Elijah Wood reads Huck in a youthful voice that may be the closest interpretation to Twain’s original intent. His performance captures the excitement and confusion of adolescence and adventure.

A Signature Performance: Tim Curry rescues Charles Dickens from the jaws of Disney with his one-of-a-kind performance of the treasured classic. Our listeners loved this version so much that it inspired our whole line of Signature Classics.

A Signature Performance: Leelee Sobieski’s Emma is sultry but vulnerable, offering a sympathetic rendering of the heroine and her plight, allowing the listener to draw his own conclusions about Madame Bovary in this cautionary tale of love, passion, and desperation.

A Signature Performance: Four-time Emmy Award winner David Hyde Pierce delivers an air of lovable self-importance in his rendition of the classic social satire that remains as fresh today as the day it was published.

Performance, ou la rencontre explosive entre un romancier en perdition, sa ravissante belle-fille et les Rolling Stones de la première époque. Un écrivain de 71 ans, déserté par l'inspiration après un AVC et menacé d'interdit bancaire, se voit proposer une série télévisuelle sur les débuts des Stones, de leur arrestation pour usage de stupéfiants en 1967 à la mort de Brian Jones en 1969.

Paterson Joseph, John Hurt, Lesley Manville and Harriet Walter are among the cast of BBC Radio 4's epic full-cast dramatisation. Adapted for radio by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Leo Tolstoy's epic story follows the fortunes of three Russian aristocratic families during the Napoleonic War. First broadcast on New Year's Day 2015, the drama also features Alun Armstrong, Natasha Little, David Calder, Phoebe Fox, Sam Reid and Joanna David. Duration: 10 hours approx.

A Signature Performance: Oscar nominee and passionate vegan Casey Affleck highlights the more-relevant-than-ever issues of business ethics and food production in Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking industry bombshell.

When a woman rekindles an early love in her late 30s her whole life changes. Deeply in love, she and her new husband want to have a child together, and they make an appointment at an IVF clinic. So begins this story, inspired by the writer Julia Leigh’s own personal memoir. This international co-production with the Barbican Theatre was praised as 'a must-hear story for our times' (Go London) on its UK premiere.

Renowned novelist and poet Thomas Hardy is best known for his fatalistic, often tragic novels set in the 'realistic dream-country' of Wessex, in south and south-west England. Drawing on his own life, he created some of the most memorable characters and stories in Victorian literature—many of which are included here. In five dramas taken from Radio 4's 'Hardy's Women' season, we meet a few of Thomas Hardy's most compelling female protagonists.

Written and performed by London-based actor and poet Jade Anouka (His Dark Materials), Heart introduces us to a woman who finds herself married and divorced at age 28. As she begins the process of piecing her life together, she confronts the insecurities and self-imposed boundaries that have always held her back. In the process, she discovers love in the last place—and with the last person—she expected.

Four gripping historical dramas centred around key figures who shaped America in the 20th century. Award-winning writer Mike Walker has created many acclaimed docudramas and historical dramas for Radio 4, including The Stuarts, Tsar, Caesar! and Plantagenet. This collection includes four nuanced dramas featuring a trio of controversial men who stamped their mark on American history: J Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Baines Nixon. Among the casts are William Hootkins, Bob Sherman, Lorelei King, Nathan Osgood and Alex Lanipekun.

Born in 1832 in Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was best known for Little Women, her phenomenal bestseller loosely based on her childhood experiences with her own sisters. Adapted numerous times for stage and screen, it is dramatised here alongside her follow-up novel Good Wives and the thrilling sensation story A Marble Woman.

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.

Still working on securing the partnership with Grace Milligan for her fuel refinery while in Fairzie, Trader and Marsh cross paths with a scouting party that has followed stories about a fuel source. That’s only the tip of the spear. That scouting party has been sent by Ironhand Jackson, the boss of El Dorado. In El Dorado, Ant, a woman who works as an enforcer for Hoyt Lynch, the self-made lord of Boardwalk, arrives to kill Jackson. Lynch has learned of the fuel refinery’s existence and desperately needs it because his own fuel reserves are running out.

World Peace turns into global civil war. In the future, the leaders of Hive nations—nations without fixed location—clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity's darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos.

Eugene O'Neill’s revolutionary 20th century dramas changed the direction of American theatre, introducing European realism and experimental techniques to the US stage. He wrote more than 50 plays, portraying characters on the margins of society and tackling controversial issues, winning a Nobel Prize, and four Pulitzer Prizes.

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.

Known as the 'Irish Chekhov', Brian Friel was one of the most renowned dramatists of his generation, producing over 30 plays in a career spanning six decades. Included here are some of his best-known works, as well as mesmerising radio documentaries featuring the author himself, in his own words.

Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk-show host and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London.

An intimate three-volume collection of moving letters from the private writings of three of the most popular writers of the 19th century, presented in a dramatised setting.