Night Waves - David Hare

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2013

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Philip Dodd is joined by the playwright David Hare whose play, The Judas Kiss, is about to open in the West End starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde. We review The Sessions, a new film based on the true story of a man confined to an iron lung who is determined, at age 38, to lose his virginity. Historian Carl Watkins joins Philip to discuss everything from memento mori to haunted moorland, along with philosopher and New Generation Thinker Timothy Secret. And Mark Binelli guides us as we venture into the heart of Detroit, once the very engine of American capitalism, but now an urban wilderness.

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, it's 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 at some level of genius. It also helps
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0:41.1	On tonight's programme, David Hare talks about his Oscar Wildplay, The Judas Kiss, which has just transferred to the West End, and a novelist goes back to a ravaged Detroit, a city so emptied by lack of jobs that the whole of Paris could fit inside its vacant lots.
1:00.0	Another time I ran into some kids from Germany and they told me, I asked them why they were there and one of them said he'd come to see the end of the world.
1:07.0	So I said, huh, well, welcome to Detroit.
1:10.0	We talked later to Mark Benelli, author of The Last Days of Detroit.
1:14.7	Plus, a review of a touching new feature film about a man in an iron lung who decides in
1:20.2	middle age, he doesn't want to die a virgin.
1:23.2	And journeys amongst the dead, a book that wants to rescue the dead from the enormous condescension of posterity and show how they impact on our lives.
1:33.6	We'll discuss later.
1:35.1	But first, David Hare on the Judas Kiss.
1:38.3	Now, David Hare's a writer for most seasons.
1:41.1	Sixteeners of his plays have been presented at the National Theatre alone. His 1998 play,
1:46.3	The Judas Kiss, which has just moved into the West End, is for much of the time a three-hander,
1:51.2	with Oscar Wilde, his young lover Bozy, and Robbie Ross, his one-time lover and close friend.
1:57.3	The first acts he's Wilde hold up in the Cadogan Hotel, with Robbie trying to persuade him
2:02.6	to leave England before he's arrested and tried for committing indecent acts. And Bozy
2:08.6	cajoling him to stay. The second act takes place in Naples after Wilde's imprisonment, where
2:14.4	Wilde and Bozy live uneasily and pennilessly together. At the end of the play,
2:20.1	it's Wilde who's abandoned, with Bozy finally returning to England to the usual life of his class.
	...

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