Myth making, satire and Caryl Churchill

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Caryl Churchill's C21st Bluebeard, the fragility of a glass girl and other myths reworked in 4 new short dramas. Jen Harvie discusses the storytelling on stage of one of Britain's leading dramatists. Hetta Howes looks back at American author Rachel Ingalls who died earlier this year aged 78. Her novel Mrs Caliban depicts a lonely housewife who befriends a sea monster.The German born US based artist Kiki Smith has produced sculptures, tapestries and artworks looking at pain and bodily decay and real and imaginary creatures in bronze, glass, gold and ink for her first solo UK exhibition in a public institution in 20 years. Gerald Scarfe has just published Long Drawn Out Trip: My Life moving from his early days at Punch and Private Eye to his designs for Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Disney’s Hercules. He's also putting together an illustrated coffee table book Scarfe: Sixty Years Of Being Rude which will be published in November.

Glass, Kill, Bluebeard, Imp 4 short dramas by Caryl Churchill, directed by James MacDonald run at London's Royal Court Theatre from September 18th - October 12th. Kiki Smith: I Am A Wanderer runs at Modern Art Oxford from September 28th to January 19th 2020. Hetta Howes is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which puts academic research onto the radio. She presents our podcast New Thinking which showcases new research. You can find past episodes on topics ranging from the philosophy of pregnancy to the links between dentistry and archaeology by signing up for the BBC Arts&Ideas podcast or looking on the Free Thinking website collection New Research.

Producer Zahid Warley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:36.7	Hello.
0:43.5	Gods, monsters, politicians and making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
0:48.6	How do we make connections with the stories that we're told about the world and challenge them too?
0:53.2	Few spend more time gauging what's true and what's false than a cartoonist. And according to one master
0:54.9	practitioner, it's a very fine judgment. I liken it really to chewing gum. You know, you can take
1:01.4	a piece of chewing gum and stretch it and stretch it and stretch it and suddenly it snaps. It's like that
1:07.5	with a caricature. You can take it as far as you possibly can, and then suddenly the likeness goes.
1:13.9	Gerald Scarf. More from him later when we discuss his memoir, Long Drawn Out Trip.
1:19.4	The new generation thinker, Heta Howes, will be here too to explore the domestic and the fantastical
1:24.6	in a novel she calls a neglected 20th century classic,
1:28.5	and the American artist Kiki Smith explains that sometimes creation is really the art of
1:33.7	knowing how to wait. But first, a girl made of glass, gods and murders, a serial killer's
1:41.4	friends, and a secret in a bottle.
1:48.2	It's always an event when the dramatist Carol Churchill opens a new play and this week sees four of them opening at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
1:53.4	Glass, Kill, Bluebeard's Friends and Imp
1:57.2	draw inspiration from myth, legend and fairy tale,
2:01.4	and invite the audience to see the extraordinary in the everyday and vice versa.
2:07.2	Jen Harvey, who's Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London,
	...

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