PLEASE NOTE:
Today our broadcast of Sir Gawain recommences, with a Monday 10-11pm rebroadcast. Then, the second and third instalments will follow next week and the week after.
Here’s what we’ll do:
We’ll run the first installment today, Sunday 10 May from 4-5pm and Monday 10-11pm
Then, we’ll run installment 2 the week after, and installment 3 the week after that.
More than two years in preparation, ArtSound’s radio adaptation of a masterpiece of mediaeval English Literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, has arrived. Its first installment, of three, airs on Sunday May 3 from 4-5pm (repeated Monday 10-11pm).
ArtSound’s Poetry on the Radio and ArtSound Radio Theatre join forces to present a three-part performance of the work. We’ve dramatised the narrative poem, set in the court of King Arthur, in a modern-language verse translation by the Canberra-based Australian poet, Keith Harrison.
An anonymous poet created Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a dialect of Middle English at around the time of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It tells of a young knight who beheads a Green Giant, and then must undertake a quest whose startling goal is to submit himself to the same fate.
Our production uses Keith Harrison’s highly regarded translation, which is published by Oxford World’s Classics of the Clarendon imprint of Oxford University Press — thanks to it for permission to use the work.
Keith Harrison is also the narrator of our production, which also features a cast of Canberra-based participants. Sir Gawain is played by Zahi Hoque; Theodore Ell plays The Green Knight and Sir Bercilak de Hautdesert; Emily Shepley is Lady Bercilak; Adrian Caesar is King Arthur; Fergus Armstrong is the Guide; and Peter Searles, Shane Strange and Peter Monaghan voice the porter and other attendants.
Shane Strange, publisher of the ACT’s leading poetry imprint, Recent Work Press, voices episode introductions by Keith Harrison. ArtSound’s communications team member Barbara Young recorded series and episode announcements.
Incidental music has been provided by Canberra-based consort Apeiron Baroque: John Ma, Marie Searles, and Lauren Davis. Thanks to Wesley Music Centre for accommodating our music recording.
And special thanks to ArtSound Manager of Technology, Chris Deacon OAM, for assistance with sound quality issues.
The three-by-one-hour series was directed and produced for ArtSound by Keith Harrison and Peter Monaghan. Keith Harrison is a poet, translator, essayist and playwright, and Emeritus Professor at Carleton College in Minnesota where he taught for many years and was sometime Editor-in-Chief of The Carleton Miscellany. Keith is the author of such works as Changes: New and Selected Poems (1966-2002); a memoir, Not Quite Ithaka (2023), and his verse translation of Sir Gawain.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight airs on Sundays May 3, 10, and 17, from 4 to 5 pm – and then on Mondays May 4, 11, and 18, from 10 to 11pm.
