Mr Pye

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Mr Pye: Episode 1

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Mr Pye, Episode 1

Adrian Scarborough stars in Mervyn Peake’s satire in a battle of good and evil.

Adrian Scarborough is Mr Pye, a man who may be too good to be true. Poet Glyn Maxwell adapts a comic tale of demonic possession written by Mervyn Peake, the author of Gormenghast.

When retired bank manager Harold Pye arrives on the island of Sark in the Channel Islands, he finds a society riven by feuds and squabbles –and he is delighted.

The small, round evangelist brings nothing but love to this microcosm of the wider world and seems determined to spread that love as far as is humanly possible. However,  there are unearthly forces also approaching the island –f rom  the divinity Pye talks to on the cliff tops to a an ominous shadow that one of the islanders has seen in the water.

Are battle lines being drawn for a momentous struggle between good and evil?

Artist poet and novelist Mervyn Peake, perhaps best known for his Gormenghast trilogy, wrote this darkly comic modern fable in the 1950s and set it on Sark, a place he knew well.

He peopled  his island home with a regiment of eccentrics, angels and monsters – Miss Dredger, the  redoubtable landlady who has never known love; the amoral Tanty who has known too much of it; the local painter Thorpe who has never sold a painting; and the monstrous busby-hatted Miss George.

This modern tale about an island divided against itself has been dramatised by New Generation poet and playwright, Glyn Maxwell (The Gambler, Cyrano de Bergerac, Shakespeare’s Fire).


Cast:
Adrian Scarborough........................Mr. Pye
Deborah Findlay..............................Miss Dredger
Christopher Harper.........................Thorpe/ Major Overshot
Emily Bowker...................................Tintagieu
Jane Whittenshaw............................Miss George
Emma Noakes...................................Kiki, Mrs. Porter
Alex Blake...........................................Pawgy
Thomas Delacourt..............................Pepe, Cragg, Outcrop

From the novel by Mervyn Peake dramatised by Glyn Maxwell
Directed by Frank Stirling 
A 7digital production for BBC Radio 4

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Mervyn Peake's charming, dramatic and troubling satire on the nature of good and evil.

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