The Man With Wings by Rachel Joyce

Rachel Joyce The Man With Wings

Features a war-damaged man who wishes to fly, and a village boy, desperate for the return of his father.

It is 1947 and there is a gloomy and desolate feel to the small Gloucestershire village where young Jack Leach's boy lives.

It is a village almost entirely populated by women and children; the men have yet to return from the war - and many will never return.

Narrator: Ian McDiarmid
Mireille: Niamh Cusack
Man: Tom Goodman-Hill
Boy: Jo Joyce-Venables
Sister Mary: Kate Binchy
Mother: Emily Joyce
Neighbour: Alex Tregear

To this village comes a group of traveling nuns, who may or may not be from a religious community, but who set up a homestead in a deserted farmhouse. Then comes the man - back from the war - who is badly injured, but is nursed back to health by the women in the farmhouse. He is befriended in particular by Mireille, one of the women, and by the young boy, for whom he professes to have a secret. What this secret is, and why the man wishes to fly, is revealed as the play progresses. The boy then witnesses a scene that will live with him forever.

This epic story about faith, forbidden love, and the intoxicating power of the imagination has one foot in the poverty of post-war rural Britain, a place of bitter disillusionment that reflects part of our society today, and another in the world of the beauty where the inconceivable may just possibly happen.

Original Music by Lucinda Mason Brown
Produced by Gordon House
A Goldhawk Essential Production for BBC Radio 4
Afternoon Drama
First broadcast:
Thu 29th Mar 2012
14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

This charming production had the grown-up son of Jack Leach (Ian McDiarmid) looking back on his childhood, at a time in 1947 when life in his Gloucestershire village was spartan, to say the least. Rationing was still in full force; and very few of the men had returned from battle, leaving the community almost exclusively peopled by women and children.

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