Opening Lines

Alice Childress’s first major work is set in a world that she knew very well both as a performer and a writer – the theatre. It’s 1957 and rehearsals are beginning for a new Broadway production – Chaos In Belleville – an anti-lynching play written by a white playwright. Veteran Black actor Wiletta Mayer is to star in the play, but after years of compromise she finally finds herself unable to go along with the patronising and insensitive portrayal of Black characters that she’s experienced throughout her career. Her consequent clash with the white director opens up deep faultlines throughout the cast and the result is chaos, not in Belleville, but on Broadway.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Valerie Curtis Newton is Head of Directing and Playwriting at the University of Washington School of Drama. She is also the Founding Artistic Director for The Hansberry Project, a professional African American theatre lab. Her many directing credits include two productions of Trouble In Mind.
Alice Childress archive clip taken from American Theatre Wing’s documentary series ‘Working in the Theatre’ – April 1987
Reader: Samantha Dakin
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? takes us into the strange and brutal world of dance marathon competitions dating from the Great Depression in America. It follows Robert and Gloria, a couple who’ve washed up in Los Angeles and whose last hope is to get spotted by talent scouts or win the prize money by being the last dancers standing.
The book’s author, Horace McCoy, had first hand experience of these competitions, which could last months, having worked as a bouncer at one himself. As John Yorke discovers, it’s a bleak tale from a difficult time, whose nihilistic underpinnings led Simone de Beauvoir to call it the first existentialist American novel. But McCoy shows just empathy for the doomed characters to make the story, in the words of contributor Denise Hamilton, hit home like a stiletto to the heart.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Contributors: Denise Hamilton, novelist and editor of ‘LA Noir’
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Producer: Geoff Bird
Reader: Eric Stroud
Executive Producer: Sara Davies

A Pier production for BBC Radio

In this second episode, John Yorke digs deeper into Euguene O’Neill’s 1921 play “Anna Christie” – about an estranged daughter who is reunited with her sea captain father, and falls in love with a sailor. The play examines identity, family and sexual politics, and asks questions about love, faith, redemption, resilience and forgiveness.
John asks how and why the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning dramatist introduced realist theatre to the US, looks at Eugene O’Neill’s influence and legacy, and asks what we should make of “Anna Christie” today.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain; from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters, now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for Radio 4.
Contributor:
Robert M. Dowling, professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, author of the biography Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts.
From the BBC archives:
Playwright Arthur Miller, from Changing Stages: America, 19 Nov 2000.
Actor Natasha Richardson, from Woman’s Hour, 18 June 1990.
Credits:
Excerpts from “Anna Christie” by Eugene O’Neill, 1921, including Ruth Wilson in the 2011 Donmar Warehouse production.
Excerpt from the 1930 film adaptation of “Anna Christie” starring Greta Garbo.
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Jack Soper
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4 & BBC Sounds

In the first of two episodes, John Yorke looks at “Anna Christie” by Eugene O’Neill - one of American theatre’s founding fathers, and the only American dramatist to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The play is about a young woman who goes in search of her estranged father, a sea captain, and falls in love with a sailor.
Debuting in 1921, “Anna Christie” is one of O’Neill’s early works – less well known and less successful than his later plays, like Long Day’s Journey into Night or The Iceman Cometh – but, as John Yorke explains, “Anna Christie” is significant both for what it tells us about one of American theatres key figures, and as a story that captures a nation at a moment of transition.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain; from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters, now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for Radio 4.
Contributors:
Robert M. Dowling, professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, author of the biography Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts.
Thomas Kail, director of a 2026 production of “Anna Christie” at St Ann’s Warehouse, New York, speaking on the WNYC podcast All Of It with Alison Stewart.
From the BBC archives:
Jude Law, The Radio 2 Arts Show, 5 August 2011
Ruth Wilson, Front Row, 5 August 2011.
Writer and critic Sarah Churchwell, Front Row 10 August 2011.
Credits:
Readings by Eric Stroud.
Excerpts from “Anna Christie” by Eugene O’Neill, 1921, including Natasha Richardson in the 1990 Young Vic production and Ruth Wilson and Jude Law in the 2011 Donmar Warehouse production.
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Jack Soper
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4 & BBC Sounds

John Yorke examines Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, ten semi-autobiographical short stories in which Dylan Thomas looks back and observes himself growing into the artist – the writer – that he became in adult life. The stories highlight Thomas’s contradictory nature. At school he failed every other subject apart from English, in which he came top. He’s a town boy who loves the countryside. He’s a bookish child who devours his father’s library of 6,000 books ‘with his eyes out on stalks’ by day, and a bit of a lad who roams Swansea by night, observing the goings-on of the city. Dylan Thomas was called a wastrel and an alcoholic, yet was incredibly productive, writing 300 pages of poems, 500 pages of radio scripts, 600 pages of film scripts and 1000 pages of letters. He began the short stories in 1938, a year after he had married Caitlin MacNamara and they’d settled with their first child in Laugharne, a small town on the coat of Carmarthenshire. Ten years later he would move into the famous Boathouse where he would live for the remainder of his life.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Contributors: John Goodby, Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, author of Critical Lives: Dylan Thomas. Joe Dunthorne, novelist, poet and journalist.
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Hub Co-ordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Kate McAll
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4