The Art of Love is a radio play by Andrew Rissik, his second in a trilogy on the origins of Christianity. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 11 April 2004. The length is 102 minutes[1].
Plot[]
After clashing with the Emperor, Roman poet Ovid is exiled.
Cast[]
- Ovid - Stephen Dillane
- Julia - Juliet Aubrey
- Fabia - Penny Downie
- Augustus Caesar - Robert Hardy
- Setorius - Peter Eyre
- Falco - Ian McNeice
- Paullus Fabius Maximus - James Laurenson
- Palamedes - Ioan Meredith
- Verrius - Damian Lynch
- Music by Mia Soteriou, and performed by the composer with Steve Bentley Kline
- Directed by Jeremy Mortimer
Critical Reception[]
"Rissik is a glorious writer, thoughtful, poetic and scholarly, which could be why he gave up being a radio critic (he was good at that, too). Radio 3 has nurtured him, in the way radio drama does when it finds someone whose work makes words blossom. He can be a bit slow or stray into passages of deepest purple, but he is worth sticking with because, even under the most heavily freighted imagery (as in his Dionysus, repeated on Radio 3 last week), there is a sinewy argument going on." - Gillian Reynolds, The Telegraph[2]