To Sean with Love by Ronan Carr

To Sean with Love by Ronan Carr

with Owen Roe as the late Sean Kenny

and Jonathan Ryan as almost everyone else.

No set designer in recent decades has achieved an international impact comparable to that of the late Sean Kenny, a Tipperary native - and he wasn't even trained in the business. A former student of the celebrity American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it was a chance encounter with Brendan Behan in the alternative London theatre of the swinging sixties that propelled his rise to fame on Broadway and the West End with a stunning series of experimental stagings that culminated in the global recognition of his sets for Lionel Bart's Oliver.

Ronan Carr's radio dramatisation of Sean Kenny's meteoric rise, as brief as it was brilliant, isn't, however, a documentary record, but the staging of a triumph, a tragical-comical-historical cabaret replete with the cultural personalities of the time, from Noel Coward to Edna O'Brien via Joan Littlewood and Michael Caine, and scored with several soaring tunes to typify the post-war period in which the English music-hall re-imagined itself magnificently as the block-buster musical.  

With Owen Roe, Jonathan Ryan, Deirdre Monaghan, Ali White, and Michael James Ford,

1st Broadcast Sunday 4th September at 8:02 PM on RTE Radio 1's Drama on One.

Sound Supervision 

Produced by Aidan Mathews 

http://www.rte.ie/culture/2016/0901/813439-play-the-joan-littlewood-debacle/