Books in mp3

 

Alan Bennett - Double Bill

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Various

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 2 hours 10 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations
Comedy
Humor
Drama
British

Our Price : $18.49

Purchase...

Patricia Routledge , Sir John Gielgud , Alan Bennett and Paul Eddington star in two plays as broadcast on BBC Radio 4

 

A Woman of No Importance - In this brilliant forerunner to Bennett's series of Talking Heads monologues, Patricia Routledge plays Margaret Schofield. a woman whose existence has long revolved around the gossip and minutiae of office life. As she recounts the events leading up to her first bout of tummy trouble, there is little hint of the developments ahead — or of the moving portrayal of brave and inevitable decline which writer and performer create between them.

Forty Years On - This BBC Radio 4 version of Alan Bennett's most popular stage play stars Sir John Gielgud , Paul Eddington , Bennett himself and other members of the original West End cast. Having been at Albion House for fifty years, man and boy the Headmaster is now retiring. Taking part in the end-of-term entertainment for the last time, he is outraged to find his beloved standards being mocked. A kaleidoscopic comedy, Forty Years On is part parody and part nostalgia for a fading English tradition.

-

 

Forty Years On

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 1 hour 35 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations

Our Price : $13.49

Purchase...

The Headmaster has been at Albion House for fifty years, man and boy. Now he is retiring and tal<es part in the end-of-year entertainment for the last time. Entitled Speak For England, Arthur, It weaves together a multi-generational story of England: the glorious era at the turn of the century, when the summers were always golden: the fast-living inter-war years peopled by the Bloomsbury Group: and the growing cynicism of a country facing a second world war with the scars of the first still fresh in their memories.

Tongue-in-cheek, the play-within-a-play prompts an outraged response from the Headmaster, who can only see his beloved standards being mocked. Yet within the parody lies an almost painful nostalgia for a more peaceful age and the timeless misunderstanding of one generation by another.

Clever, funny and poignant, Alan Bennett's masterful play is rightly regarded as a modern classic.

Written By
Alan Bennett

First Broadcast
BBC Radio 4
28 August 2000