A VALENTINE FOR EXECUTION

Director Peter Kavanagh
BBC Radio 4, Monday Play, 1998
Complications ensue when an illiterate peasant and her imprisoned lover have to ask other people to transcribe their letters.

Pedrillo..................................Michael Maloney
Jose-Manuela...............................Adjoa Andoh
Saul............................................ Pip Donaghy
Padre Miguel............................... Oliver Cotton

The Express on Sunday, 8 February, 1998

RADIO REVIEW by Ben Garner

SHEETS IN THE FRIGDE?  It's a good play

On Monday night Michele Celeste's play A VALENTINE FOR EXECUTION (BBC Radio Four) , nimbly directed by Peter Kavanagh, took just under an hour to sweep through 25 years in the lives of two condemned political prisoners, and a woman and her priest  back home.  The plot turned on deceptive love letters. Michael Maloney (Pedrillo)  and Pip Donaghy (Saul) were respectively impassioned and unscrupulous  as the ill-matched cell-mates, but it was Adjoah Andoh (Pedrillo's girlfriend Jose-Manuela)  who carried the real theme, the power of words.  
A rapid succession of final audio snapshots - a prison farewell, school bell, firing squad, mass demonstration - rounded-off the political action, as Jose-Manuela privately declared her renewed faith in language.
All this would have cost a fortune to film and its big idea - our best actions can spring from a sincere misunderstanding of others' words - would have not  been the very fabric of the action.  Like Jose-Manuela, all we had were words from the dark.  I think Madga tried to tell me about her day somewhere in the middle, but I was miles away.
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