Turn of phrase

There’s been quite a lot about Rhys in the papers recently, on the 30th anniversary of her death. This touching, atmospheric documentary (produced by Sara Davies) gave us so much more in just 30 minutes. All we had were Stephenson’s memories, threaded through with those of Rhys’s own words (voiced by Merelina Kendall) and those of her publisher Diana Athill, but by the end you could almost feel Rhys’s presence in the room.

As Athill told us, Rhys was an inadequate person, battered by life, her tiny frame shrouded in hopelessness and disappointment. She terrified the children of the village of Cheriton Fitzpaine where she lived, said Stephenson, the wicked witch in the woods, just as she herself had been terrified as a child by the voodoo magic of Dominica. Inside her, though, there was this writer; a writer who did not flinch from admitting to her demons, but always with the eyes of a poet, so that her books never leave you feeling hopelessly akin to suicide but determined to survive — just as she somehow did.

Radio Three’s Mendelssohn Weekend culminated with an imaginative performance of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the composer himself would have heard it — within a performance of the play. I was lucky enough to be in the Middle Temple Hall on the night and was hugely entertained by the cleverness of the direction (by Tim Carroll), casting a magic spell over this very solid Tudor edifice with its heavy wooden panelling and hammerbeam roof. Nothing much was lost by listening to it on the radio on Sunday evening, hearing again that light-as-a-feather music and having the chance somehow to savour Shakespeare’s dancing prose. I did wonder whether the voices of Oberon, Bottom and co., would have been lost in transit from Hall to sitting-room. But I should not have doubted the sophistication of the BBC’s production values (masterminded on the night by David Papp). And, after 27 years of the Sony Awards, Radio Three has at last been recognised as UK Station of the Year.