BBC Radio 3 produces little-known screenplay The Beach of Falesa, taken up by Richard Burton but never made into a film
It is not a typical Dylan Thomas subject – murder, mystery and intrigue in the South Pacific – and the script he wrote, despite being bought by the actor Richard Burton, never developed into the film he was hoping for.
But now at least it will be performed on the airwaves, as Radio 3 has said it will broadcast the world premiere of the all but forgotten work The Beach of Falesa.
The drama will be broadcast in May to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth and will be the first production of the little-known piece.
Matthew Dodd, head of Radio 3 speech programmes, called the production a "fantastic thing" for the station and said it continued a relationship with Thomas that went back 50 years – it was the Third Programme, Radio 3's predecessor, which first broadcast Under Milk Wood.
The Beach of Falesa "is a very dark story, very tense", Dodd said, adding: "I can't imagine why film producers didn't take it up."
The author's screenplay is based on a late 19th century short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Whether it was a film producer's idea or Thomas's is not known, but the writer undoubtedly harboured big hopes of it reaching the big screen, said Alison Hindell, the BBC's head of audio drama.
The screenplay went through the hands of two now defunct film companies, and after Thomas's death, in 1953, the rights were bought by Burton.
"I'm fairly sure he was imagining himself in the central role," said Hindell. "It is a very Burtonesque role."
For whatever reason the actor could not get the project going, even after enlisting Christopher Isherwood to work on it in the late 1960s.
The script was published posthumously in 1963 and it came to Hindell's attention only by a bizarre and serendipitous coincidence.
"My stepdaughter moved in to a new house in Sydney and the only thing the previous owner had left was the published edition of this screenplay," she said.
Her stepdaughter knew she had produced Thomas's work on the radio.
Hindell said: "I realised that, with some cutting down, it was a gift for a radio production because the narrative voice is very much the voice of Dylan Thomas. You can really hear his intonations, his imagery, his vocal mellifluousness. That itself is going to be a plum role for somebody I hope."
There are very few subsequent references to the script and if anyone does hold the rights, it is not known whom that is.
Quite why it never made it to the big screen is also a mystery.
"Maybe it was just too expensive to make," said Hindell. "They would have had to go somewhere that looked like Tahiti. It is a great story … a murder mystery. Maybe someone will make a film of it now."
The broadcast will be a highlight of the station's spring season, announced by the Radio 3 controller Roger Wright. He noted that some people were still surprised that Radio 3 broadcast drama. "The range of what we do is often either not known about or is taken for granted," he said.
Another highlight will be Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston starring in a new production of Antony and Cleopatra, on 20 April.
There will also, of course, be plenty of classical music with the schedules cleared on 7 March for a Ravel day between 6.30am and midnight. This celebration follows similar days devoted to the music of composers including Mozart, Schubert and Webern.
Other highlights announced on Wednesday include a 25-part series of conversations with living composers about their workspaces, entitled Composers' Rooms, plus a three-part series exploring music and Jewish identity presented by Norman Lebrecht.
There will also be live concert broadcasts every night, including, this coming Sunday, the world premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' 10th Symphony, by the London Symphony Orchestra.
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