BBC 3 April 11th 2010: Malady feat. Lunar Caustic Reading

I missed the above - anyone got a recording?

The great American essayist, Susan Sontag, once said that we all carry two passports – one that allows us into the kingdom of the well and another, which we’re less inclined to use, that ushers us into the realm of the sick. This week’s edition of Words and Music is all about that kingdom of malady – from the famous musical sneeze in Kodaly’s Hary Janos suite to the balm of the Bach aria “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen”; or, if you prefer, from Harold Pinter’s description of electroconvulsive therapy in The Caretaker to John Evelyn’s eye-watering account of the seventeenth century’s way with bladder stones. Its not all so visceral though. Many indispositions begin in our minds…sometimes they are trivial as in Grieg’s vague feelings of homesickness and sometimes they are serious as in Malcolm Lowry’s grotesque and comical account of the hallucinations brought on by dipsomania.
Talking about illness can be part of a cure so maybe listening can affect a kind of healing too. The readers for this journey into the night-side of life are Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin.

Producer: Zahid Warley

More details here

The show featured the following:

Author of text: Malcolm Lowry
Name of text: From Lunar Caustic
From book: From Lunar Caustic
Reader: Rory Kinnear
Dur: 01'59

One of the music tracks played was by Gil Scott Heron which has an ironic touch with regard to Malc's time in NY!

Francis Edward Faragoh's Pin-Wheel

Lowry mentions Pin-Wheel in his filmscript for Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night in a sequence where the character Dick Divers walks past cinemas and theatres on Broadway in New York where this show is showing.



Faragoh's Pin-wheel was performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse, NY, USA during February 1927.

John Howard Lawson was but one of the five experimental dramatists who organized the New Playwrights' Theatre in the winter of 1926-27. The others were EmJo Basshe, John Dos Passos, Francis Edwards Faragoh, and Michael Gold. While the critic Alexander Woollcott clubbed them the "revolting playwrights," the New York Times ( February 7, 1927) called the founders of the new theatre "recognized . . . advocates of the so called 'expressionistic drama.'" Dos Passos, who died recently, is well known as a novelist. Mike Gold, longtime editor of New Masses and champion of proletarian literature, died in 1967. Em Jo Basshe, like Gold, had been associated with the Provincetown Players, who produced his expressionistic Adam Solitaire in 1925. He died in 1939. Before joining the New Playwrights, Francis Edwards Faragoh had been drama editor of Pearson's Magazine and had translated Lajos Egri's expressionistic Rapid Transit. All five had had plays produced prior to the New Playwrights venture.

Most of the practical work involved in organizing the New Playwrights' Theatre was done by Mike Gold. The artistic pacesetter, however, was Lawson (and not Dos Passos as a recent study of the New Playwrights has rather unconvincingly tried to establish). Lawson's views on "the new theatre" were published in several New York newspapers as well as in the Pinwheel play-bill of the Neighborhood Playhouse (season 1926-27).

Francis Edward Faragoh was born in Budapest in 1895. Educated at the City College on New York and Columbia University.

Immigrated to the United States in 1909.

In a literary contest held by Pearson's Magazine in 1924, Faragoh's short story "Curtain" took the first prize, and his story "The Distant Street" won the fourth prize. The three judges were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Floyd Dell.

In 1953, the counsel to the House Un-American Activities Committee said the committee had testimony that Faragoh had been a Communist, although writer-director Robert Rossen testified that he believed Faragoh was not a party member.

Died in 1966.

Eugene O'Neill The Hairy Ape on Broadway

Lowry mentions The Hairy Ape in his filmscript for Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night in a sequence where the character Dick Divers walks past cinemas and theatres on Broadway in New York where this show is showing.

Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape was first produced by the Provincetown Players in 1922. The production, directed and designed by Robert Edmond Jones, was praised for its use of expressionistic set design and staging techniques, and was transferred to a theatre on Broadway. Actor Louis Wolheim became famous for his interpretation of Yank

Malc On Broadway

We are in the middle of posting information on movies and plays from Malc's Tender Is The Night Filmscript centred around Broadway in New York

Here is a fabulously evocative piece of film from that period:

Broadway - The Great White Way

Dick walking, already all the illuminated signs of the Great White Way are in full swing. Tender Is The Night Fimscript in the Cinema of Malcolm Lowry Edited by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen

Lowry mentions several movies and plays in his filmscript for Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night in a sequence where the character Dick Divers walks past cinemas and theatres on Broadway in New York.

Malc lists:

Flaherty's Moana
Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum
Pabst's Secrets of A Soul
Great Garbo and John Gilbert in The Flesh and The Devil
Hit The Deck
The Hairy Ape
Pinwheel
A Bill of Divorcement
Karel Kapek's R.U.R.
The Doctor's Dilemma
Macbeth