Maud: BBC Radio 4 broadcast

Thanks to Flip for spotting that Joseph's recording of Maud will broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, July 26th.

Tennyson's Maud

Sunday 26 July
3.00-4.00pm

BBC RADIO 4 

Tennyson's Maud is a tale of love, murder and madness in a haunting monodrama by one of the world's greatest poets. This classic serial is a collaboration between BBC Radio Drama and award-winning sound designer Christopher Shutt, to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

A disturbed and outcast young man roams the windswept hills haunted by his father's suicide and his mother's early death. He blames his father's old friend, the lord of the Hall, for his ruin. The young man was betrothed to Maud, the lord's daughter, when they were children, but she and her family left the area after the suicide. However, suddenly, today, there are workmen up at the Hall. Maud has come home.

Joseph Millson performs the poem and captures the rapid mood-swings of Tennyson's disturbed, dangerous and yearning protagonist – while Christopher Shutt's sound design mirrors the beauty and chaos inside the young man's head.

Maud is a piece of jewelled Victoriana, but it addresses very modern neuroses. Tennyson described the poem as "the history of a morbid poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age". His anti-hero is racked with the despair induced by a society divided by wealth; the lack of faith in politicians and leaders; and the sublimation of personal frustration into military ambition.

Maud shocked the public on its publication in 1855 in the middle of the Crimean War. Its darkness disgusted its readers, and it has only recently begun to receive critical recognition for its extraordinary mixture of hypnotically beautiful lyric poetry and wild metrical experimentation.

Reader/Joseph Millson,

Producer/Abigail le Fleming
BBC Radio 4 Publicity