Arts & Drama Audio

Douglas Henshall, Sophie Dahl and Susannah York star in Shakespeare’s passionate story of doomed love.BBC Radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since 1923, when the newly formed company broadcast its first full-length play, generations of actors and producers have honed and perfected the craft of making Shakespeare to be heard. With the intimacy of radio the full beauty and meaning of some of the most lyrical lines ever written can be truly heard: tenderness and passion, betrayal and bigotry are brilliantly evoked as the tale comes to its tragic conclusion.

The play is introduced by Richard Eyre, former Director of the Royal National Theatre.

This is Shakespeare for the new millennium.

Romeo & Juliet

On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got on together for the next three weeks is the subject of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, by Papa, a tender and funny extract from Hawthorne’s notebooks, perhaps one of the earliest accounts in literature of a father caring for a young child.

Each day starts early and will be given over to swimming and skipping stones, berry picking and subduing armies of thistles. At one point Mr. Herman Melville comes over to enjoy a late night discussion of eternity over cigars.

With an introduction by Paul Auster, this delightful true-life story by a great American writer emerges from obscurity to shine a delightful light upon family life — then and now. The collection also includes Hawthorne’s short stories “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Audio Collection

Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes ‘unstuck in time’ after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut’s most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch-22, it fashions the author’s experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut’s other works, but the book’s basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it unique poignancy — and humor.

Slaughterhouse-Five