Stevie
by Hugh Whitemore
With Glenda Jackson [Stevie Smith], Mona Washbourne [Stevie's Aunt], Peter Egan [Freddie], and David March [The Friend].
The poems are read by Hugh Dickson.
Directed by Dickon Reed for the BBC World Service
Broadcast on Radio 4, 18th December 1978, Monday Play
Also broadcast, date unknown, as the World Service Play of the Week
160/44; 66.9 MB; sound quality good
Encode note: The Radio 4 version probably runs a little longer than the World Service edit, which was the source of this encode. The final credits were added on from a lower-quality source.
Stevie Smith came across a newspaper clipping one day that told of a man who drowned within a few hundred yards of the shore. The people on the beach saw him waving, and they waved back. The truth, as Stevie expressed it in her famous poem, "Not Waving but Drowning", was the man's problem was just like her own.
Stevie Smith was a British poet of considerable reputation, who died in 1971 at the age of 69. She spent almost all her life living in a small home in the London suburb of Palmers Green, where she moved as a child. She worked every day in an office in the city, until her growing reputation as a poet allowed her to take early retirement. She lived with a maiden aunt, and would eventually become an old maid herself.
To the world, she must have appeared to be an exemplary example of a talented English eccentric. Her poems were irreverent, sharply satirical, and laconic. But as in her most famous poem, she was not waving, but drowning.
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Stevie Smith was born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name 'Stevie' as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey, Steve Donaghue.
Whitemore?s play, "Stevie: A Play from the Life and Work of Stevie Smith", was first produced in The Richmond Theatre, Surrey, U.K., followed by a run at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, both in 1977. It starred Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith and Mona Washbourne as Stevie's aunt, and both reprised their roles in this radio production. They also reprised their roles in a 1978 film of the play.
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