Barbican & UK Tour 2011

This breathtaking and lavish Lincoln Center Theater production reinvented the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein show, swept the 2008 Tony Awards, played to sold-out houses on Broadway, and was televised across America.

Set on a tropical island during World War II, this is the sweeping romantic story of two couples, threatened by the realities of war and by their own prejudices. Its portrayal of Americans stationed in an alien culture in wartime is as poignant today as when it first thrilled audiences in 1949.

Considered one of the finest musicals ever written, the score includes Some Enchanted Evening, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair and There is Nothin’ Like a Dame.

Promenade is co-producing South Pacific with Genesius Theatrical Productions, Robert Boyett Inc, the Ambassadors Theatre Group and Bob Bartner.

Barbican Dates:

15th Aug to 1st Oct 2011

For Tickets, Click Here

Neither Muriel, Younis’ landlady, nor Major Douglas, his MOD case officer, can help the Afghan interpreter from being sent home to his uncertain fate in Afghanistan.

Maybe a penguin can help…

Michael Hastings’ wry look at the world through the eyes of those who play an unsung part in the war in Afghanistan.

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, April 2011.

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.

Broadcast in five short plays for BBC Radio 4
Woman’s Hour Drama, 3rd – 7th Nov 2008

Broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 11th May 2008

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, the last member of a great Sicilian family, died childless, impoverished and unknown, leaving behind him a recently completed manuscript of a novel. The following year the novel, The Leopard, was published to acclaim and is now recognised and one of the finest works of twentieth-century literature. Five years after its publication Luchino Visconti made his celebrated film starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival.

In the book Don Fabrizio’s, the Leopard, closest and most intimate relations, family and counsellor reveal the passing of his world – a symbol of the change that came about during the republican unification of Italy in 1860. His support for his romantically inclined nephew, Tancredi, allows his family to wed the beautiful daughter of the uncouth, newly moneyed Sicily in the figure of the mayor of the town where his country palace is situated. The old feudal system is dying. But Don Fabrizio clings on to an ancient rule – ‘we must change to remain the same’.

Playwright and screen writer, Michael Hasting’s new adaptation views the Prince from the prism of his family, servants and his confessor and takes the story to its conclusion twenty years after Don Fabrizio’s death.

Broadcast in three parts for The Classic Serial on BBC Radio 4

Two men from very different backgrounds return to the town of Treby Magna in the midlands in 1832 – just after the passing of the Reform Act, extending the franchise to property owners. HAROLD TRANSOME, on the death of his dissolute older brother, has become heir to an estate and returns from the orient determined to become an M.P., though his haughty mother is shocked to discover that he intends to stand as a Radical.

FELIX HOLT also reappears in his native town and proves an equal disappointment to his mother for he has abandoned his education to set up as a humble watch-mender with a determination to set up a school for miner’s children.

Though Felix may be the eponymous hero, the true protagonist of the story is ESTHER LYON – a young woman who must discover what she truly values in her choice between these two men. She believes herself to be the daughter of the town’s kindly Dissenting Minister, but the discovery of the truth of her background threatens to overturn the status quo of this provincial town. This is not the only secret known to the manipulative lawyer, MATTHEW JERMYN – the principal antagonist.

This relatively unknown work by one of the finest 19th century novelists, George Eliot, is set at a time of great political turmoil. In three one hour episodes this adaptation captures a world of political skulduggery and the virtues of genuine social change.

A man and a younger woman embark on an affair which they promise each other will not end in love, until they discover that life cannot be so simply constructed.

Liz, who has had an unhappy affair with a married man, meets a solo classical musician, Paul, in the foyer of a concert hall after she has been performing. He invites her to audition for a new quartet. He finds her attractive but to prevent any commitment he invents a story that he is married. At the same time she also says she is married.

adapted in four parts for The Classic Serial on BBC Radio 4, December 2004.

Samuel Pickwick and his friends set out on a journey to discover their world in Dickens’ comically tragic and profoundly daft tale of Innocence abroad. Tricked by conmen and traduced and imprisoned by lawyers, guileless Samuel’s faith in human nature is in tatters until it is salvaged by the street-kid philosopher, Sam Weller. So our buffoon becomes a hero and comes through everything that a murky world can throw at him with his innocence intact.

“Timothy Spall and Sue Johnston head a sparky and talented cast in this rumbustious adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic tale on an innocent abroad.” Daily Mail

“Funny, brisk and entertaining.” Sunday Times

“Timothy Spall and Sue Johnston head a fine cast in Michael Eaton’s lively adaptation of Charles Dickens’s picaresque first novel.” The Observer

For some time God has been meaning to speak directly to people and after some trial and error with various knobs he manages to break into the BBC Afternoon Play where he settles down with a cup of tea to try and resolve a few things.

His train of thought is interrupted by faxes (which he must not answer, he must not get directly involved), but one of them catches his eye and before he knows it he is telling us about what happened to a little girl and her cat that she never let out of her sight.

Ben Steiner’s first play for radio stars Tom Courtenay as God.