American playwright Neil Simon has enjoyed unprecedented commercial success. This intimate portrait explores the sources of his unique brand of humour and includes interviews with colleagues, among them Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Marsha Mason, as well as Simon himself and his brother Danny. With extracts from stage productions and films, his career is traced from Broadway to Hollywood, giving an overview of his varied dramatic repertoire.
The Temba Theatre Company
Britain’s leading Black theatre Company has developed an impressively broad range of work, ranging from the classics to modern and political dramas. Temba’s research into the theatrical traditions of Africa and the Caribbean led to the creation of their production Glory, which draws on the spectacular and vivacious styles they discovered. This programme looks at the play and explores its roots in the company’s own history and in the West Indies.
Raymond Carver
On his death in 1988, the American writer Carver was mourned as a national literary figure. Only ten years before he had been a chronic alcoholic, abandoned by his wife and family. From these experiences he produced stories and poems of profound humanity about the downside of the American Dream. This film portrait includes interviews with his second wife, his close friends and members of his family, as well as dramatisations of two of his most famous stories.
Joseph Brodsky
In this profile the dynamic and provocative Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and a United States citizen until his death in 1996, talks at length about his poetry and recollects growing up in Russia. His account of his creative life there is illustrated with documentary and archive footage, and friends and colleagues from both his native and adopted homelands contribute. Brodsky’s poems are read by Igor Panich.
Communicado
Communicado, a touring Company which works in Scotland, is one of Britain’s most innovative and exciting theatre groups. This programme follows the development of one of its projects, a daring theatrical extravaganza by Jock Tamson called Bairns. It sits in on rehearsals and witnesses the grand spectacle of the finished piece.
Fitzrovia
The Second World War was a particularly active period for British writers and this literary portrait of that era includes an anthology of their poetry and prose. Anthony Powell, Alan Ross and Roy Fuller represent those who saw military action, and interviewees, including Stephen Spender and Peggy Ashcroft, focus on the experiences of the writers who were in London during the Blitz.
African Literature as Celebration
This lecture by Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost contemporary novelist, provides an eloquent introduction to the new and genuinely great world literature which has emerged from Africa in the past fifty years.
Martin Amis
Noted for his provocative, dark comedies, satirising the more grotesque aspects of modern urban life, Martin Amis is the leading British novelist of his generation. In this profile, he reads from his book, London Fields, and explains how the onset of what he describes as “early middle age” changed his outlook on tife and death.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Colombian author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, is best-known for his novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, which have become phenomenal best-sellers world-wide. Less well known is his interest in, and work for, cinema. In this film, shot in Colombia and Cuba, Márquez gives a rare interview in which he talks about his involvement in Latin American cinema and the way in which this intermeshes with his writing.
Robert Lowell
Lowell is regarded as America’s greatest poet of the post-war period. Literary critic lan Hamilton wrote the first biography to appear after his death in 1977 and this film looks at Lowell’s life and work through the process of his research. There are readings of his poems, together with contributions from intimate friends.