WAVES BREAKING ON A SHORE by Neil Brand and Michael Eaton

A play in two parts, for BBC Radio 4, May 2010

The audacity of Waves Breaking on a Shore is that it is a play about a medium without sound written specifically for a medium without images! A story about a new way of seeing offered by the cinema manages to be entirely appropriate as a subject for radio drama. Both Neil Brand and Michael Eaton are aficionados of a neglected period of early cinema history and the links between the gradually emerging form and the older pleasures of popular live entertainment.

At the turn of the twentieth century two vaudevillians, one Irish the other Jewish, are striving for success as a music hall double act: Cohen and Cohan, when they find themselves bitten by the bug of cinematography at the birth of film.