The debt British culture owes to Anthony Burgess
It’s bold of Radio 3 to schedule its Sunday night play in straight opposition to the BBC’s massive budget dramas but, as audience choices go, it’s not entirely a bad idea. Like six million other television viewers, I watched the first episode of BBC One’s SS-GB last week. Like three million fellow disappointees (because of its unintelligible dialogue, unconvincing acting and characterisation based on the dressing-up box), I forsook it this week. What for? An ancient play that has become the backbone of all tragic fiction ever since.
King Oedipus by Sophocles is a tale of fate that no matter who tells it, in what form or language, grips heart and head. It’s the story of a great man destroyed by things he does not know but the audience can guess. As it unfolds, we feel for him but know his destiny is inevitable. No wonder Anthony Burgess, novelist, polymath, cultural omnivore, leapt at the chance to make a new version of it for the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was performed there in 1973, to acclaim. It has not been heard of since, until Radio 3’s striking new production last Sunday.
First, though, it helps to understand why Radio 3 is currently marking the centenary of Burgess’s birth. Tune to
The Essay, all this week on Radio 3 at 10.45pm, to grasp some of his scholarly range. Listen and be entertained, for what Burgess liked to do, above all, was make you laugh. Producer Polly Thomas has made a fine choice of her speakers.
Tonight, novelist Simon Rennie on how Burgess, born 50 years before Rennie in the same Manchester terraced houses of Harpurhey, read, learned and listened his way to success as a writer, why his ear for language made him a chronicler of culture like no other. Tomorrow, Rhoda Koenig, wittily and astutely, assesses Burgess the literary critic. On Friday, Kevin Jackson discusses him as the inventive linguist of A Clockwork Orange. On Monday, AL Kennedy hailed his craftsmanship and showmanship. Last night, Ash Taw saluted Burgess’s significant grasp of foreign speech in all its class-indicative comic subtlety.
Oedipus, of course, is not a barrel of laughs. It’s a more of a hard swim across a deep lake of memory and apprehension. The Burgess version rearranges it only slightly, to heighten expectation. This production, with Christopher Eccleston powerfully in the lead and a stunning performance from John Shrapnel as the priest, had momentum from the start, taking us with it to the inevitable revelation that this was, indeed if unknowingly, a man who had killed his father and, succeeding him as king, married the widowed queen, his mother. The horror: the exhausting, eternal horror. Thank you, Radio 3, for reminding us that there is more to drama than putting on costumes.
Radio 4 likes to try out some new comedies in the 11.00pm slot. Last night, for instance, there was Sarah Kendall with the first part of her Australian Trilogy. She is amazing. I expected someone droll. She was but much more too, telling a story about childhood that scratched way below the surface. It sounded as if it had happened but, actually, that didn’t matter. By making us laugh, suddenly stop, then laugh more warily, she created something way beyond the factual but deep into the true. The week before, Jack and Millie, was written by and starred brother and sister Jeremy and Rebecca Front as a married couple, Jewish, just beyond middle age. The dialogue was salty, the observation sharp, the acting by the whole cast superb. Yet if it becomes a series, as I hope it will, it can afford to be subtler.
I wonder when Radio 4 is going to find a year-round film programme that is as entertaining, informed and strongly constructed as Paul Gambaccini’s And the Academy Award Goes to…? For the past two Saturdays, Gambaccini and producer Paul Kobrak have featured two previous multi-Oscar winners, All
About Eve (1950) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), establishing their social as well as cultural significance with authority. The trilogy concludes this week with
Schindler’s List (1993). I am a fan of Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review show on 5 Live (Fridays). But between bletherings on Radio 4’s Saturday
Review and witterings on Front Row, and not forgetting Today’s attempts to grip the mishaps of Sunday’s actual Academy Awards ceremony, there’s only Francine Stock’s The Film
Programme (Thursdays) and it sounds weary of being caught between what’s on and who’s available. Surely there’s room for a better appraisal of the art, craft, history and business of movies.