Romantic comedy for BBC Radio 4, directed by Cherry Cookson.
Romantic comedy for BBC Radio 4, directed by Cherry Cookson.
Daily Mail: An exceptionally deft piece of writing - pacy snappy and without a word wasted. If only that could be said of more radio drama.
Writers Weekly (Radio 4): Cherry Cookson: It's one of those perfect plays that we're always looking for. It's very concise; there isn't a single redundant word of dialogue. It's witty, it's quite moving at the end and it's the sort of thing that the whole style of it will work very well on radio. And it had a sort of style to it which I think is quite rare and made me interested in him as a writer.
Time Out: An entertaining tale of romantic folly, in which a middle-aged teacher falls for a French film-maker. James Woolf's script takes an elliptical route, thereby adding extra interest to his whimsical story.
Nigel Kerton, unexceptional middle aged teacher of English literature, briefly encounters a French TV journalist at his school and decides that he cannot live without her. The story of his quest to win her heart, which is played out across Europe against the backdrop of collapsing communist regimes, is told by his slightly bemused ex-colleague Diane.
Directed by Cherry Cookson, the cast included Bill Nighy, Lesley Sharp, and Stephen Moore. The play was shortlisted for the Richard Imison memorial award.
"The play I wrote for the RSC was based on a lot of testimony of people who lived in Warwickshire. When I first was given all that material, I just couldn’t write it for a year and a half. But suddenly what happened was the characters came alive, and I then found it quite straightforward to write. And then I was in rehearsals one day, and I thought, these people really remind me of somebody, and then I realised that it was my family, my grandmother and my mother arguing away. It took ages for that material to go into my unconscious and connect with my personal back history, and then they really came alive."