Insignificance

Basic Info

Genre: Drama (Radio)

Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4

Broadcast: Saturday 9 June 2007, 2:30-3:00pm

Production Co: BBC Radio

Cast: Allan Corduner (The professor), Megan Dodds (The actress), John Guerrasio (The senator), Damian Lewis (The ballplayer)

Crew: Roxana Silbert (Director), Catherine Bailey (Producer)

Description

It’s New York, 1953, and a beautiful film star, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, a baseball player and an infamous senator meet for an extraordinary confrontation. Insignificance is playwright Terry Johnson’s imaginary meeting of four archetypal characters in a New York hotel room.

Their meeting coincides with a plan for the House Committee on Un-American Activities to meet at the same time as the movie The Seven Year Itch is on location.

The actress in the play, Marilyn Monroe, breathlessly analyses the theory of relativity for the Nobel Prize-winning Albert Einstein, who is in awe of her intuitive erudition. When her star baseball-player husband turns up it becomes clear just how wide the gulf is between their hopes and dreams of love and the lonely reality of stardom.

Insignificance is directed by Roxana Silbert, the artistic director of the award-winning new writing theatre company Paines Plough, and it stars Allan Corduner, Megan Dodds, John Guerrasio and Damian Lewis.

Insignificance was first presented at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was the basis for a Nicholas Roeg film of the same title.

Producer/Catherine Bailey

Source: BBC

Review

It’s 1953 and in a New York hotel room four archetypal characters are exploring love, life and the universe. If they sound familiar then that’s because they are meant to. Allan Corduer’s professor bears a remarkable resemblance to Albert Einstein; John Guerrasio’s senator is a Joe McCarthy clone; and Damian Lewis’s intellectually stunted ballplayer is a dead ringer for Joe DiMaggio. But it is Megan Dodds as the beautiful, breathless but ultimately doomed actress - yes, of course, it’s Marilyn Monroe - who delivers the intellectual as well as the emotional punches in this spellbinding, thought provoking psychological drama.

Source: Radio Times