Original Theatre continues to lead the way in Streamed content with their eleventh online production of the last year. This time it is a live staged reading of a radio play from the stage of the Oxford Playhouse Theatre with scripts in hand after a half-day of read-throughs and a day of technical rehearsal with the cameras. It might help that the marvellous three lead actors had all performed in it before in 2012 on the radio, although Anton Lesser admitted afterwards he did not remember that performance! Philip Franks directed the piece for the stream with a clever addition of an actress appearing as the ghost of Patricia, the Special Operations Executive operative captured by the Gestapo immediately as she landed in occupied France.
David Morley's script is based on real-life characters from the Second World War, the code breaker Leo Marks and the intelligence Officer Vera Atkins who reported to Colonel Maurice Buckmaster who headed the French section. He imagines a meeting fifty years after the war between them and a fictional character John Harrison who was captured in France and was held in German prisoner of war camps from July 1943 until liberation in April 1945. Harrison sent messages back to London from France which led to Patricia, who both Marks and Harrison love, being dropped into France.
