Radio Times

Review by:

Jane Anderson

A successful segue from Dr Faustus’s desperate final soliloquy (the Christopher Marlowe incarnation of the scholar) into Black Sabbath’s eponymous blood-chilling anthem is a link that was made in heaven. Or, rather, in hell. And these two venues for the human soul are the subject of a particularly exciting edition of Words and Music. Prepare to be whisked from the Garden of Eden into a seductive world of vampires and dominatrices before plunging back to earthbound reality where, according to Auden, evil is “unspectacular and always human.”

About this programme

Works on the theme of evil, from the Garden of Eden in Genesis and Milton's Paradise Lost, to the vampires and dominatrices of Baudelaire and Swinburne, via the black magic of Aleister Crowley and Christopher Marlowe. With readings by Ann Mitchell and Andrew Wincott, texts from the Bible, Beowulf and Blake, and the music of Berg, Britten and Black Sabbath.

Cast and crew

Crew

Producer

Clive Portbury

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