Start the Week

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BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

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Start the Week: Family struggles - from Greek tragedy to The Troubles

Family struggles - from Greek tragedy to The Troubles

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Family struggles - from Greek tragedy to The Troubles

Kirsty Wark with Sally Bayley, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Lisa Dwan.

Sally Bayley, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Lisa Dwan talk about family struggles and finding in hope in expected places, with Kirsty Wark.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry-Londonderry at the height of the Troubles, to a Catholic mother and Protestant father. In Thin Places she traces a life affected by poverty, loss and violence, and the invisible border that runs through it. But she tells Kirsty Wark how the natural world has helped heal the traumas of childhood.

For the writer Sally Bayley it was Shakespeare that brought her solace and ignited her imagination. Growing up in a working class household with no father figures Bayley roamed through his plays looking for companions and escape from her oppressive home. In No Boys Play Here: A Story of Shakespeare & My Family’s Missing Men she explores the crisis of male homelessness and mental illness.

The award-winning actress Lisa Dwan has a deep affiliation with the works of Samuel Beckett. But in her latest performance she reaches back to the ancient Greek tragedians reimagined by another acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín. In Pale Sister she recounts Sophocles’ tragedy of Antigone from the viewpoint of her sister, Ismene. 

Producer: Katy Hickman

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Family struggles - from Greek tragedy to The Troubles

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