Do3 08-03-15 Electra

[aeolium]

As part of the celebrations of International Women's Day, a new production of Sophocles' Electra for Drama on 3:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051zxlm

Since the musical side of the celebrations leading up to IWD has focused on women composers, it's a shame in a way that Do3 is not presenting a work by a woman playwright, such as Lucy Prebble's Enron or Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, but it is still a great female role in a classic play and a new production for R3 (based on the stage version given at the Old Vic last year).

[french frank]

Eight of the 13 credits are women, and it is a fine drama. It remains to be seen, once the live concert arrangements have all been honoured, whether Do3 will return to the earlier slot, which, if nothing else would signal that drama is to be taken more seriously by Radio 3.

BBC television seems to have taken the view that 'drama' should simply be soaps, serials/series, dramatisations &c. Apart from some Shakespeare dotted in here and there, 'classic' drama means Dickens, Austen, Laurence Sterne, RF Delderfield. If live opera (and live ballet), why not live theatre? To say nothing of new BBC productions? Plays are differently conceived from novels and serials.

But that takes the discussion off to another tack. Here's to another classic (a BBC rarity).

[french frank]

And, to keep the flame alight here until the play is performed, another timely announcement:

"A play about four generations of women growing up in Croatia after World War Two has won a prestigious playwriting prize for women.

Tena Stivicic received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her sweeping family saga 3 Winters, performed at London's National Theatre last year. London-based Stivicic was presented with her $25,000 (£16,300) prize at New York's Playwrights Horizons theatre."

??? :-)

[2LO]

. . .It remains to be seen, once the live concert arrangements have all been honoured, whether Do3 will return to the earlier slot, which, if nothing else would signal that drama is to be taken more seriously by Radio 3.

Indeed. Sophocles with cocoa late on a Sunday night is a tall order and not giving any production a fair chance.
A first, scheduled, on-air broadcast (even of a recording) has an immediacy that is absent when 'listening again' and dramatic news isn't made at bedtime - for me anyway.

[aeolium]

BBC television seems to have taken the view that 'drama' should simply be soaps, serials/series, dramatisations &c. Apart from some Shakespeare dotted in here and there, 'classic' drama means Dickens, Austen, Laurence Sterne, RF Delderfield. If live opera (and live ballet), why not live theatre? To say nothing of new BBC productions? Plays are differently conceived from novels and serials.

Yes. If the National Theatre, the RSC and the Globe think live theatre is worth broadcasting (to cinema) then why not the UK's public service broadcaster? And I regret that there is nothing nowadays like "Play for Today" which introduced the work of contemporary playwrights often writing about their own times yet in very different styles. Instead, today's dramas - when not soaps or hospital series - are usually serialisations, typically of period costume drama or crime series (and the best of the latter are often imported). For all the hype about Wolf Hall, it remains a period costume drama based on historical novels written about an era nearly half a millennium ago. Where is the drama about our own time, which could not be said to lack material for it? It is here, but it is just not appearing on TV or (in sufficient quantity) on radio - it is confined to the stage.

[Honoured Guest]

As part of the celebrations of International Women's Day, a new production of Sophocles' Electra for Drama on 3:
Since the musical side of the celebrations leading up to IWD has focused on women composers, it's a shame in a way that Do3 is not presenting a work by a woman playwright,

"Music composed by PJ Harvey"
who is a woman.

[aeolium]

"Music composed by PJ Harvey"
who is a woman.

Yes, I saw that. But Drama on 3 is a programme broadcasting plays (if one has to shout) and it would have been good to have a play by a woman playwright, especially as there are some very talented ones alive today.

[aeolium]

I thought this stage production transferred well to radio, with powerful performances from the main protagonists. The mixed voices of the chorus were well differentiated between each other but the leader's voice could have been easier to distinguish from that of Kristin Scott Thomas as Electra. KST varied well between impassioned grief and implacable and icy vengeance (occasionally the passionate speeches made the detail of the text hard to pick up). I wonder how much allusions to classical myth (e.g. Niobe, Artemis) are now so lost to a general audience that it is only the general outline of the story that is picked up. The pitiless revenge in which Aegisthus is brought to a covered body which he believes is the corpse of his enemy Orestes only to discover it is Clytemnestra was conveyed with a kind of black humour - strange how this version of the story differs from that of Euripides in which Aegisthus is killed first.

Aspects of the story bring to mind the plot of Hamlet: the revenge taken by the son of a murdered father on the man who usurped his throne, though here the avenging figure is both brother and sister (whose mother is also guilty).

[french frank]

Again, recorded. I doubt I can get to this before next Sunday ... At least we're now getting a few worthwhile plays, even if some are repeats.