Visitors is a radio play by Peter Tinniswood. The last play he wrote before his death in 2003, it was adapted for radio by Liz Goulding. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 07 October 2010, as an installment of the Afternoon Play. The duration is 45 minutes.
Plot[]
Set on a misty Thames embankment over the course of several evenings, the play recounts the meetings of two hospital "visitors", Shacklock and the much younger Stella.
Cast[]
- Shacklock - Roy Hudd
- Stella - Emma Fielding
- Music by David Chilton
- Directed by Gordon House
Critical Reception[]
"It was that mesmerising prospect: writing that captures just how people speak, framed by a dramatic situation that is fascinatingly bizarre. Two hospital visitors, who visit the dying, meet by a river to talk intensely and cryptically about life, love, and the end of both." - Elizabeth Mahoney, The Guardian[1].
"This two-hander was enigmatic, tender, funny and resigned to fate, but never gloomy. The play had an abstract, poetic quality as a couple, both apparently working as visitors to those with terminal illnesses, had one of their frequent meetings outside the hospital. Roy Hudd was jaunty yet elegiac as Shacklock, puffing away on cigarettes, hymning a defiant paean to Butler and Lambert, while Emma Fielding was cool and elusive as Stella, at once a seductress and yet unattainable, whose rejoinder was a soft “Hey ho”. The dialogue was multi-layered and intriguing. The cruel inevitabilities of life jostled with a vaudevillian sense of humour. There were hints of Samuel Beckett, a suggestion of John Osborne’s The Entertainer and a bit of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress." - Moira Petty, The Stage[2].
References[]
- ↑ Mahoney, Elizabeth. The Guardian
- ↑ Petty, Moira The Stage