Showing results by narrator "Harriet Walter" in All Categories

Series 1-5 of the groundbreaking BBC Radio 4 drama charting life on the home front during World War One. First heard on radio between 4 August 2014 and 9 November 2018, each episode of Home Front is set exactly 100 years before the broadcast date, and each follows one character’s day. Together they create a mosaic of experience from a wide cross section of society, mixing historical fact with enthralling fiction to explore how ordinary people coped with daily life in wartime Britain.

When Maxim de Winter brings his shy new bride to his beautiful stately home on the Cornwall coast, it seems like all her dreams have come true. The terrace slopes to the lawns, the lawns stretch to the sea and the gardens are full of scented flowers. But she soon finds that Manderley is haunted by the shadow of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who died the year before. It was Rebecca who made the house and gardens the showpiece of the county and her memory is revered by all, especially the housekeeper Mrs Danvers.

Renowned for his wit, style and sophistication, Noël Coward was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. His plays, set in the glittering world of high society in which he lived, are much admired and have remained in the popular theatre repertoire to this day. This collection brings together the very best radio adaptation

The world has changed around 79-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael, a.k.a. Missy. Though quick to admit that she often found her roles as a housewife and mother less than satisfying, Missy once led a bustling life driven by two children, an accomplished and celebrated husband, and a Classics degree from Cambridge. Now, her husband is gone, her daughter is estranged after a shattering argument, and her son has moved to his wife's native Australia, taking Missy's beloved only grandchild half-a-world away.

Catherine McCormack, Joseph Fiennes, and Harriet Walter star in this BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's last and most remarkable novel. Passion and perception run through this fascinating study of loneliness, love, and ultimate triumph over adversity.

It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace.

J. B. Priestley was one of Britain's most significant writers. His output was prodigious: in his lifetime, he penned 26 novels, 39 plays and hundreds of essays. He enjoyed great success on stage, notably with Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, which experimented with narrative structure and unorthodox theories of time. Included here are some of his most esteemed works, adapted for radio and brought together in one statement collection.

Like most families, they had their secrets...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the '50s was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.

This is the collected BBC radio productions of the internationally renowned playwright Tom Stoppard. One of the giants of British theatre, Sir Tom Stoppard has been writing for the stage and screen for over 50 years. Full of wit, verbal brilliance and big ideas, his plays appeal to critics and audiences alike and are among the most studied works of the last century.

As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new life, whose dark, war-ravaged days feel very removed from the peace and love being preached in church and at school. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. She feels an instant kinship with these vivid, beautiful, terrifying tales of the end of the gods - they seem far more real, far more familiar during these precarious days.

The planet of Windhaven was not originally a home to humans, but it became one following the crash of a colony starship. It is a world of small islands, harsh weather, and monster-infested seas. Communication among the scattered settlements was virtually impossible until the discovery that, thanks to light gravity and a dense atmosphere, humans were able to fly with the aid of metal wings made of bits of the cannibalized spaceship.

Dame Harriet Walter, renowned for her wonderful portrayals in Succession and Killing Eve, among others, is one of Britain's most esteemed Shakespearean actors. Now, having played most of Shakespeare's female characters, audaciously, she lets them speak their minds. With new parts for thirty Shakespearean women, written in 'Shakespearean' verse and prose, Harriet Walter goes between the lines of the plays to let us hear what she imagines - sometimes playfully and sometimes searchingly - these women were really thinking.

Raunchy, risqué and rebellious, early Restoration comedies were a breath of fresh air for 17th century theatregoers. With Charles II restored to the throne in 1660, Oliver Cromwell's ban on stage performances was rescinded, and for the first time, women were invited to tread the boards as actresses. Playwrights developed a new style of social comedy, packed with amorous escapades, bawdy humour, wicked wit and sexual innuendo. This scintillating anthology showcases six leading lights of early Restoration drama.

This BBC Radio collection includes the Booker nominated A Month in the Country. Be transported to the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where, in the aftermath of the First World War, survivor Tom Birkin spends a summer uncovering a medieval mural in the local church.

Queen Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived. When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves; when they dreamed of her, they dreamed of themselves. She mirrored their hopes and anxieties. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist; to the awestruck, charismatic; and to the cynical, humdrum. Though by nature reserved and unassuming, her presence could fill presidents and rock gods with terror. For close to a century, she inhabited the psyche of a nation.

Maggie Smith and Jonathan Pryce star in William Wycherley’s raunchy Restoration comedy. Considered too obscene to be staged in its original form for nearly 200 years, William Wycherley’s bawdy comedy tells the tale of Mr Horner, a notorious rake who spreads the false rumour that he is impotent in order to gain free access to other men’s wives. When he meets the young, innocent Margery Pinchwife, the ‘country wife’ of the title, the scene is set for scandal.

A notorious author shares a train compartment with a long-time reader. But can they connect with each other through a silent tide of self-doubt and second-guessing? From the playwright of Art. Sir David Suchet and Dame Harriet Walter star in L.A. Theatre Works' performance of Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man. Translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Gordon House.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983. Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Her mother likes to bring conversation back to the War, although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways.

Imogen Waterstone has always prided herself on being a thoroughly independent young woman, but now she needs a man of implacable will and nerves of iron. That's why she invited Matthias Marshall, infamous Earl of Colchester, to her home in Upper Strickland. Who better than the legendary explorer to help her lay the perfect trap? Her scheme is simple, really: She plans to let it be known that when she inherited her uncle's collection of antiquities, she also inherited a map to a fabulous ancient treasure.

Graham Greene was the 20th century’s master of plot, an expert chronicler of Catholic guilt, Cold War intrigue, conflict and crime. A prolific polymath, his work incorporated serious novels, thrillers, short stories, screenplays, stage plays and more. This wide-ranging box set includes the finest examples of his early work, written between 1932 and 1948, and contains over 15 hours of unmissable drama.