Afternoon Play on Radio 4 is ‘not for the sexually squeamish’
RADIO 4 will push the boundaries today with an afternoon play so explicit that it is being advertised as “not for the sexually squeamish”.
The adaptation of The White Hotel, DM Thomas’s erotic novel, is based on a previously unseen screenplay by Dennis Potter. It will begin after a warning to listeners about its graphic content.
Anne-marie Duff stars as Lisa, a young woman from Odessa whose sexually charged diary entries bleed into violent premonitions of the Holocaust.
Thomas has described the book as “the story of a woman who embraces all the tragedy of the first half of the 20th century”, ending with the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar ravine in Kiev.
The play will be broadcast this afternoon at 2.30pm, and Jon Amiel, the director, acknowledged that it will shock.
He said: “The material in the screenplay is extremely vivid and extremely explicit. The collision of sexuality and mortality is very, very present.
“So this is not a show for the sexually squeamish. It’s explicit, it’s joyful, it’s in no way pornographic.
“It is an incredibly provocative work. In counterpointing an intimate psychoanalytic profile of a damaged woman with her written sexual fantasies and the absolute horrors of the Holocaust, I think it still has the power to shock profoundly.
“But in its intimate portrayal of one victim among 30,000 who died in the ravine at Babi Yar, it gives an astonishing sense of the scale of human loss – one brain, one soul, one spirit, among thousands of bodies.
“The hopes, dreams and inspirations, loves and losses are so effectively described that it gives more scale to the atrocity than any other account I could ever imagine.”
Duff said of the content: “I think it’s bold as you like. One of the huge themes is sex, and the way that we regard desire when it’s inside a female is a conversation that we don’t often have.
“Even now, if we’re honest, in huge parts of the world the idea that a woman could have sexual iteration or be allowed to love as she pleases could cost her her life.”
The White Hotel was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1981 but lost to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.
The play is part of Radio 4’s Unmade Movies strand. Several attempts were made to film The White Hotel, including a version starring Barbra Streisand. She was reportedly put off by the plans of Bernardo Bertolucci, the director, to include graphic sexual content.
Another project, directed by David Lynch and starring Isabella Rossellini, then his partner, fell apart when the couple split.
Thomas said of the Radio 4 adaptation: “I shall listen to it with great interest, feeling it is not quite The White Hotel. But then, what adaptation ever is?”