The Wednesday Play & Play for Today

Dominick is a London suburbanite of the year 2130, who “goes flipside” by stepping into his flying saucer and landing on the London of 1980. Both centuries, he finds, have their advantages. Dominick’s 2130 environment is a stress-free society, but antiseptic and colourless.

Though people have lost inhibitions about nudity, sex itself is dispassionate. No one smokes cigarettes, and the air is not polluted. But then, no one has ever smelled a rose, and cooking is less tasty than nowadays.Read More »

Now a respected teacher of temporal observers, Dominick has not visited the past for several years. He is content with his lot, resigned to the idea that he will never again see Jane, the lover he left in 1980, or their son. Then his boss gives him a new mission: to find out what has become of one of Dominick’s students, Pyrus Bonnington, who has gone missing in 1982.Read More »

Written by Helene Hanff (book) & Hugh Whitemore (dramatisation)

Quote:
‘…people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English Literature…’

When Arthur Dent receives an alien tongue-lashing on arrival at yet another inhospitable planet during The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he observes in exasperation: ‘Why doesn’t anyone ever seem to pleased to see us?’1 One answer to that question might well be: ‘Because drama and comedy rely on conflict to make them work.’ There’s rarely a great deal of mileage to be extracted from people liking one another and generally getting on, but when the trick is pulled off, the results can be delightful and surprising.Read More »

Two boys at school in the 1950s. Two professional men in their dubious prime today. Two Sundays and two crises. What have they to do with each other and which child is father of the man?Read More »

Jill is a successful career woman, and when she has a baby to her live-in-lover her friends all think it will be fun, but Jill’s priorities change.Read More »

Set in Greenock, and written by Greenock-born writer Hugh McManus, the play tells the tragic tale of the effects of alcoholism and violence on the family of Jean McLeod.

Two of Jean’s children are taken into care, and her husband Jim believes in beating her up every night. Still she tries to hold her family together – and then something happens which makes her snap and fight back.Read More »

Torn between a long-suffering wife and a neurotic, demanding mistress, a lawyer suffers a series of personal crises.Read More »

A drama set around the terrifying Brixton riots of 1981 and how the civil riots affected the lives of a group of people living there is the subject of the Play for Today episode Hard Feelings.

The action centres on a house shared by four Oxford graduates – girls Viv and Jane, and their male companions Rusty and Baz.Read More »

Written by Rose Tremain

Camilla is a mid-thirties woman whose world is collapsing around her, with an unexciting marriage, a daughter with whom she cannot communicate, and a neurotic mother facing a shoplifting charge.

Just when she feels she cannot cope any longer, a little bit of her past catches up with her again.

Liam is her former lover, and an English lecturer at college. He sends her a letter and so begins a series of events which help her to begin to rebuild her life and create some hope for her future.Read More »