Output details

Amazonia

This submission centres on a 90-minute audio drama script by Lyons for a major BBC Radio 3 broadcast by Crosslab Productions. The play – an account of Arthur Ransome’s ‘secret life’ as war correspondent and double agent in Russia during the Revolution - was a practice-led exploration triggered by release of Ransome’s MI5 file in 2005, and the discovery of relevant Soviet police documents. Research was contextualized by a new biography and other work on Ransome’s Russian period, benefitting from extensive analysis of little known papers in the Ransome Archive at the University of Leeds. AMAZONIA broke fresh ground, illuminating Ransome’s contradictions through dramatization, including his romance with Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, and their collaboration in smuggling jewelry out of Russia to help finance the Red Army during the Civil War. In compositional terms, the play was a particular experiment in factual drama, a hybrid form identified by Crook (1999) as especially radiogenic, dispensing with the standard convention of inner monologue for a story driven by quotations from reports, telegrams and letters. Edited transcripts were interwoven with historical dramatization and imagined episodes to create an emotional and metaphorical narrative. The experimental dimension was enhanced by the recording, which took place on location away from the studio to capture a more convincing sound. This is evidenced in the portfolio by production photos and the broadcast audio disc, featuring Rory Kinnear and Michelle Dockery. Other supporting documentation includes reviews. Insights produced by the project fed into a public debate about Ransome’s hidden early career, leading to an invitation to give a keynote at a specialist literary event. The compositional insights link to other work by the researcher into factual drama (see journal article REF Output 1).

Outputs: 90 minute broadcast, Radio 3, February, 2010. Repeated November, 2010. Literary event lecture. Previews, reviews.