Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray  - BBC Classic Serial (2003)
Dramatised by Don McCamphill
Directed Lawrence Jackson

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 3pm,
Sunday 5 & 12 January 2003
(repeated at 9pm on 11 and 18 January 2003)

Starring:
Gerard McSorley
Andrew Scott
Tina Kellegher
Sheila Hancock
Kenneth Cranham
and David Kelly as the Chevalier de Balibari

With
Jamie Foreman, Darragh Kelly, Don Wycherley,
Mark Lambert, Frank O’Sullivan, Doreen Keogh,
Kevin Flood, Eanna MacLiam and Alice Barry.

This Recording taken from Digital Satellite Source encoded to 128kbps mp3, 44 Hz Stereo
Total Size- 104MB (52 MB x2)
Total Length- 114 mins (57mins x2).

Ripped from the audio torrent site radioarchive.cc.


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63) wrote BARRY LYNDON in 1844. It was neither a commercial nor a critical success at the time, and even its author preferred his later masterpieces VANITY FAIR and THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND. Yet this fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue continues to win literary admirers more than a century on from its original publication. Its profile was raised by Stanley Kubrick’s ravishing film version in 1975, but whereas Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON is stately, pictorial and dreamy, Thackeray’s is fast, furious and bitterly funny. Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray dramatised by Don McCamphill captures the energetic, anarchic spirit of the original novel.

Central to the story of BARRY LYNDON is its hero’s emergence as a truly nasty piece of work. Listeners will witness Barry’s metamorphosis from a fresh-faced rural lad into wife-beating bully, a man whose path you would not want to cross. Thackeray drew part of his inspiration from the amoral but entertaining memoirs of Galway highwayman Captain Freeny and partly from the fiction of his literary heroes Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. In the novel Thackeray delivers a boisterous, TOM JONES-style rite of passage, whilst painting a cold portrait of the rise and fall of a violent sociopath - a peasant who becomes a gangster and loses his battle with society. The story concludes with Barry languishing in Fleet Prison yet still devoid of any self-awareness, his one consolation though is that he achieved fame. Ironically this obsession with celebrity status makes BARRY LYNDON startlingly pertinent to our times.

Episode One
Rural Ireland in the 1760s. 15-year old REDMOND BARRY’s naturally proud temperament and claims of descent from the High Kings of Ireland are encouraged by his hard-bitten but sentimental mother BELL. She sends him away to stay at the castle of her relatives the BRADYS, which starts a torrent of misadventures for the hero. Believing himself to have been wronged in love by his cousin NORA, he kills her suitor CAPTAIN QUIN in a duel and flees to Dublin where he is fleeced of what money he has by the swindlers FITZSIMONS and wife. Redmond joins the English Army and on board ship to the Seven Years War in Germany, is reunited with CAPTAIN FAGAN from his Brady days, who informs him that the duel with QUIN was all a set-up so the family wouldn’t lose the suitor’s much-needed income. At the Battle of Minden Redmond’s new-found mentor FAGAN is killed; he deserts but is unlucky to be next drafted into the Prussian army, ending up in Berlin working as an agent for Prussian intelligence. A chance reunion with his father’s long-lost brother the self-styled CHEVALIER DE BALIBARI leads to the two fleeing Berlin to pursue a lucrative career as card-sharps or "Knights of the Baize Table" across the courts of Europe. When their fortune finally runs out, they look around for an heiress whom Redmond can marry: he is tempted by the wealthy young wife of the ancient LORD LYNDON, and, in the wake of the latter’s death, Redmond decides to pursue his prey back to Ireland.


Episode Two
Redmond cuts a dashing figure back at home in Dublin and enlists the aid of his cousin ULICK to help him land the prize, the widow LADY LYNDON and her fortune. Through a mixture of intimidation and doggedness Redmond finally wins her hand, and the unlikely newlyweds move to her family seat of Hackton in Devon, where Redmond takes the title of Barry Lyndon and proceeds to redecorate the house and its estate and embark on the dissolute life of a country squire. His attempts at buying himself a peerage are blocked, however, by the English aristocracy who never accept him; his boorish rages lead to increasing paranoia and ill-treatment of his wife, turning to grief at the death in a riding accident of their 3-year old son BRYAN. Barry’s debtors close in and through a subterfuge LADY LYNDON, who has been kept a prisoner in her own home, contrives to lure her husband to London where he is arrested by her conspirators and saviours. He is thrown into Fleet Prison where he remains for the next twenty years, visited only by his faithful mother BELL, narrating his adventures to us with no apparent sense of guilt, only glory.




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