BBC

BBC Pop-Up Radio Drama Studio at Summerhall

© BBC - Photographer: Richard Ansett
_ Time: 17.00
_ Duration: 90 mins
_ Age Suitability: 16+
_ Venue: Radio Studio

The BBC is creating an intimate live pop up radio studio at Summerhall. Eight fresh audio plays from leading writers are being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Plays

Two young women are ​on the cusp of adulthood but not feeling ready for it. So they decide to postpone it further and go travelling. What starts as a fun escape, starts to open old wounds, uncovering resentment, sexual violence and potentially even stronger bonds of friendship.

Lulu Raczka is an award-winning young playwright and Company Director of Barrel Organ Theatre, with whom she worked on her first play ‘Nothing’. Her most recent play is A Girl in School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar)

Only suitable for audiences aged 16 and above.

This performance has strong language and sexual content.

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A new radio drama recorded for broadcast starring Meera Syal as Sita, and written by award-winning writer Tanika Gupta.

It is Christmas day and these are the last 30 minutes of Sita’s life. As she struggles to differentiate reality from dreams and hallucinations, she is visited by two old friends from the past bearing gifts, memories and a hint of what’s to come. But what is a good way to die? Sita tracks back across her life, zigzagging between the sights and sounds from idyllic childhood to challenging motherhood. But who is the mysterious boy who fetches her mangos and teases her about her fear of leaving?

Meera Syal CBE is an actress, writer, comedian and playwright, known for TV’s Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42, her award winning novel Anita and Me and numerous other stage and screen hits.

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What unites the Profumo affair (sex, a Russian spy and the secretary of state for war), the Great Train Robbery (£2.6 million taken from a Glasgow to London Royal Mail train by a 15-strong gang of robbers) and the assassination of John F Kennedy the 35th President of the United States? They all took place in 1963, the same year in which writer Peter Flannery passed the 11+ and his friend next door hanged himself. A pivotal yea which Flannery re-visits and interrogates from the vantage point of his much older self.

A new play from the acclaimed writer Peter Flannery, creator of numerous TV dramas including Our Friends in the North. Recorded at this performance for broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

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A comedy about the philosophy of sound. Do we all hear things the same way? Can we be tricked into hearing what isn’t there?

When Ben, a sound engineer, is working alone late one night he hears a mysterious noise. and follows it to the studio next door where he meets Isla, a sound designer trying out different sound effects for her on-line show. Ben questions her right to be there: has she slipped in through the night to use the studio for free? Isla questions Ben’s right to ‘own’ sound. When she plays him something, have they really heard the same thing? Are our senses objective or do we hear what we want through our own pre-conceptions? And of course, is Isla really there at all?

A new play recorded at this performance for broadcast on BBC Radio.

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What if EVERYTHING you heard was music?

Sam is born blind, as a toddler she prefers hitting things to speaking.  Her rage turns into patterns and then into melody. We hear Sam trans mutate the ordinary sounds of our lives into an orchestra.

In this new drama a ground-breaking score finds the hidden music within everyday life: portraying a world that has always been there, but which the majority of us never notice. With music from composer Adrian Leung, sound design from Matt Thompson and directed by Cherry Cookson. Recorded at this performance for broadcast on BBC Radio.

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Sometimes fear is an aphrodisiac. Sometimes it’s a killer. Award-winning writer, Oliver Emanuel creates a new fast-paced, roller-coaster of a thriller about adultery, blackmail and the heady power of fear.

Oliver Emanuel has written for most of the major theatre companies in Scotland and his work has been seen across the UK, Ireland, Europe, Canada, USA and China. He is a regular writer for BBC Radio including Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money. After Fear is recorded at this performance for broadcast on BBC Radio.

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A new branch of the story of boyhood friends explored in Jacob’s award winning collection Jackself. It is set in a world both recognisably modern as well as starkly folkloric and weird. It recounts the journey of two boys through spaces real and rumoured, through the great forest of Blackwood, where voices and music weave alternative histories of boyhood, troubled friendship and the north of England. As well as a moving drama, ‘The Blackwood’ is a haunting ‘landscape in noise’, created by musician and sound designer, John Alder.

Jacob Polley is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink, Little Gods, The Havocs and Jackself, which won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. His Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town, was published in 2009. Born in Cumbria, Jacob now lives and works in Newcastle.

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‘I am trying to remember the young woman that I was before I had children. I am trying to see who I am now… I am a writer and I have a splinter of ice in my heart and in my eye.’

Nell Leyshon performs her own story of how her reinvention of herself after children is halted by illness. It is a story of the body, medicine, statistics and the NHS; a story of motherhood and being a woman; a story of writing and of speaking with our own authentic voices.

Nell Leyshon is a prize-winning novelist and playwright, whose play Comfort me with Apples, won an Evening Standard Theatre and she’s written plays for the Lyceum Sheffield, Theatre Royal, Plymouth, and RADA. She’s written a libretto, The River Keeper, for Streetwise Opera, a charity which works with homeless people and this year Nell Lyshon became a trustee of the Globe Theatre.

Recorded at this performance for broadcast on BBC Radio

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A couple in crisis are stuck on a transatlantic flight together in this drama about special relationships, miscommunication and lousy lasagne.

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