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Front Row: Gillian Slovo on The Riots; WWII film Resistance

Gillian Slovo on The Riots; WWII film Resistance

21/11/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Gillian Slovo on The Riots; WWII film Resistance

With Kirsty Lang, including Gillian Slovo on her play The Riots; WWII film Resistance.

With Kirsty Lang, including Gillian Slovo on her play The Riots; WWII film Resistance; re-assessing the theatre designer Oliver Messel; the art of sound design.

With Kirsty Lang

The Riots, a new play by Gillian Slovo, draws on 55 hours of interviews with people who were involved in the disturbances earlier this year, ranging from policemen to the rioters themselves. She reflects on whether theatre can help to uncover the truth behind the unrest.

A sound designer won the prize for Best Design at last night's Evening Standard Theatre Awards, winning against three set designers. Adam Cork discusses the soundscapes he created for productions including Derek Jacobi's King Lear. 

Resistance is a new film based on a novel by Owen Sheers, which imagines that Britain is under Nazi occupation. In a Welsh valley, the farmers' wives wake up one morning in 1944 to discover that all their men have disappeared. Mark Eccleston reviews. 

Oliver Messel was perhaps the most celebrated theatrical designer Britain has ever produced. His white-on-white design in 1932 for Helen, an updating of Offenbach's operetta, caused a sensation not just on stage but in the world of fashionable society, when people began painting their walls white - a previously unused colour in interior design. Thomas Messel, Oliver's nephew, has edited the first-ever study of Messel's complete work and explains why his uncle's approach was so new. 


Producer: Lisa Davis.

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