A celebration of the 1920s – the Art Deco era with music by Janacek, Tailleferre and Gershwin and readings from Dorothy Parker, Jean Rhys and PG Wodehouse.
This programme celebrates the world of Art Deco, a style that came into its own in the years after World War One and was named for an exhibition in Paris in 1925. Even if you don’t know the name, the visuals are very familiar: think flapper girls in bobbed haircuts, candy-coloured Miami Beach architecture, French Riviera Hotels or New York’s Empire State. The mood is light – it was a time to throw off the war years and show off. You will hear from fun-loving characters like Bertie Wooster and Lorelei Lee; about the lure of international travel in the writing of Ernest Hemingway or innovation in the music of Eric Satie. There is virtuosic showing off from Dorothy Parker and Agatha Christie as well as in Ravel, Germaine Tailleferre and Ella Fitzgerald. And we will touch too on the flipside of all this excess – this was after all a decade of fun that ended in economic depression – in writing from F Scott Fitzgerald and Claude Mackay and the music of Janacek.
The readers are Jessica Raine of The Devil’s Hour and Call The Midwife with the Olivier-award-winning star of Hamilton, Giles Terera.
Readings:
Riviera Dreaming by Maureen Emerson
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Quartet by Jean Rhys
The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham
Symptom Recital by Dorothy Parker
My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
Manhood by Michael Leiris
The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock
Jazzonia by Langston Hughes
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
Art Deco’s Bad Girl by Walker Mimms
The Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie
The Tropics in New York by Claude McKay
The Long Weekend by Adrian Tinniswood
The Second Coming by WB Yeats
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Echoes of the Jazz Age by F Scott Fitzgerald
Produced in Salford by Olive Clancy
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