Afternoon Play - Visitors

Peter Tinniswoood's final play, written just before his death in 2003, is an elegaic drama on the shortness of life and the frailty of love. Shacklock ..... Roy Hudd Stella ..... Emma Fielding Music ..... David Chilton Abridger ..... Liz Goulding Producer ..... Gordon House Shortly before he died, Peter Tinniswood - one of Radio Drama's iconic dramatists - wrote Visitors. Set on a misty Thames embankment over the course of several evenings, the play recounts the meetings of two hospital "visitors", Shacklock and the much younger Stella, whose relationship - strange, erotic and yet seemingly entirely innocent, is the bedrock of this hauntingly sad and beautiful drama about the shortness of life and the frailty of love. We are in archetypal Tinniswood territory, where nothing is straightforward, where words take on a surreal existence of their own (the visitors' respective patients live in "Indifferent Ward" and "Terrified Ward") and where the quiet beauty of much of the descriptions is undercut by recurring echoes of loss, transience and death. Our two characters' lives, like Vladamir and Estragon, while providing much humour and no little sexual frisson, are essentially brief and unfulfilling.