Free Thinking

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The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: Dystopian thinking

Dystopian thinking

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Dystopian thinking

As Kay Dick's They opens at MIF, Matthew Sweet and guests trace the history of dystopias.

Manchester International Festival is staging an adaptation of a 1977 novel that imagines a Britain purged of culture. Matthew Sweet asks how plausible are dystopian visions?

Dystopias are a longstanding staple of film and literature, particularly science fiction, but what can we learn from them?  Do they simply entrench despair or act as a prompt to improve the world? And what do The Two Ronnies have to do with all this?  As a stage adaptation of Kay Dick's 1977 novel 'They: A Sequence of Unease' opens at the Manchester International Festival - a work that imagines a Britain that has been purged of culture - Matthew Sweet is joined by writer Una McCormack and New Generation Thinkers Sarah Dillon and SJ Beard to trace the history of dystopias and what they tell us about the fears and preoccupations of successive generations.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight's adaptation of 'They: A Sequence of Unease' by Kay Dick is at John Rylands Library, Manchester 5th-9th July 2023.

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