Night Waves - Tom Paulin/Chekhov Anniversary/Free Will/Precious

Philip Dodd talks to the poet and playwright Tom Paulin. Tom's new version of Euripides's Medea, the Greek myth of the betrayed wife whose desperate revenge destroys her own children, has reignited Paulin's interest in translating classical mythology. Tom's new adaptation of the play will be performed by Northern Broadsides, the theatre company that brought us Lenny Henry as Othello. This year is the 150th anniversary of Chekhov's birth, and as a BBC Radio 3 season celebrates the fact, Philip with Konstantin Eggert and Rosamund Bartlett explore the different ways in which Chekhov's work has been received in Russia, taking in his popularity during the Soviet era, right up to recent performances of his plays in Moscow. In the 1970s the American psychologist Benjamin Libet devised an experiment which demonstrated that when we make a decision to push a button, for example, that the unconscious brain had already started preparing this action before we 'know' that we've decided to do it. As the Royal Society of the Arts in London hosts a demonstration of Libet's famous experiment in London, we invite Professor Patrick Haggard from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University Collge, London, and Professor Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy, to discuss this experiment and what the scientific and philosophical implications of it might be for what we currently call Free Will. And a review by anthropologist Kit Davis of Precious, the new film which is attracting attention because it stars pop diva Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as an African-American teenager in 1980s Harlem, whose friendship with a school teacher offers her an escape from her abusive homelife.