»While a radio play describing an invented world must make invented people dramatically believable, the feature must convince the listener that the things being communicated are true. That it is about real problems, real people, and not a fiction. That is the classic distinction. However the boundaries between the two have long since been blurred.«
Klaus Lindemann.
Radio play and radio tableau, the art of sound or the art of radio? On this page you will also find pieces that deliberately play with the boundaries between radio plays and features. Biographical notes in English can be found under “Biographie”. Below you will find programmes that have been adapted into English for ABC in Sydney and some additional programmes in German that can be followed with the help of English translations provided at the bottom of the page.
- Karma of Tin
- Extraordinary. Stille. Ce soir
- The Broken Promise
- Works in German with available English translation
>> to the full version of all radio plays: to access this secured area, please write to the following email address download@jean-claude-kuner.de in order to immediately receive the key to the download area.
Karma of Tin
Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner
Production: ABC Australia / 2008
Broadcast: ABC / 14.11.2008
Length: 54:03
Awards: Basler Featurepreis 08, Prix Marulic (Category Documentary) 2009
An exploration of modern India told through the story of the Dabawallahs, the people working in the highly efficient meal delivery system of Mumbai.
Each morning 5,000 Dabbawallahs collect approximately 200,000 meal containers in the suburbs and deliver them to offices in the city centre. Four hours later the empty containers are collected and returned. It’s a delivery system that started in the 1890s to accommodate people from different ethnic backgrounds with strict rules about how food should be prepared. It functions without managers or supervision; most of the workers are illiterate and all receive the same wages.
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Extraordinary. Stille. Ce soir
Producers: Jean-Claude Kuner und Andrea Marggraf
Actors: Fritz Lichtenhahn, Tonio Arango, Klaus Herm, Friedhelm Ptok
Piano: Thomas Bächli
Production: DLR / SWR / WDR / ABC / 2006
Broadcast: ABC / May 2006
Length: 52:02
Awards: Grand Prix Marulic (Category Documentary) 2006
Life and work. Can an author’s biography shed light upon his work? James Knowlson answered this question with an emphatic “no” for years. “Biographical knowledge won’t help us in understanding Waiting for Godot,” he maintained in lectures. Now, after the work on his monumental Beckett biography, the Professor and founder of the Beckett archive in Reading reaches completely different conclusions.
Beckett himself always saw a strict separation between his work and private life, which he guarded rigorously. He didn’t give interviews and even forbade the recording of his voice.
Life and work. This broadcast itself is also seeking out this contraposition, somewhere between radio play and feature. The literary world of the Irish author is confronted with his life. The memories of relatives, friends and former colleagues help us see a Beckett that has little to do with the image he maintained – the disheartened and demoralised author who primarily wrote about death, decay and age.
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The Broken Promise
Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner
Production: Jean-Claude Kuner / 2006
Broadcast: ABC / May 2007
Length: 58:30
Awards: Prix Marulic (Category Documentary) 2005
An Albanian history student, Stavri (21), is researching the traditions of his country, the “Kanun”, common law that has existed for hundreds of years and is especially prevalent in the rural north of the country. The “Kanun” also sets rules for blood revenge. Although the communists banned the Kanun, after the collapse of the former government it once again became the law of the land in remote regions of the country.
Stavri comes to realise that new cases of blood revenge have little to do with the old text and laws of the “Kanun”. No one is following any of the rules anymore, whether old or new. Since the government and its (judiciary) agents are quite weak across the land, more and more people are taking ‘the law’ into their own hands.
The feature confronts a historic case of blood revenge (inspired by Ismael Kadarés novel The Broken April) with today’s reality.
The young Albanian’s research gives him deeper insights into the backwardness of these traditional ways of life and the conflicts between old and new, thus providing a glimpse into the strange and sometimes very foreign world of the Balkans.
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The full version can be ordered as audio book (LAB 7080) through www.laborrecords.com or http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/JeanClaudeKuner
Release date Fall 2009.
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Translated Work
Here you can find the English translations to the following pieces:
Country Cooking from Central France
Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner
Actor: Ulrich Matthes
Music: Gerd Bessler
Production: Deutschlandfunk / Hessischer Rundfunk / 2008
Broadcast: Deutschlandfunk / 23.12.2008
Length: 49:37
Awards: Prix Marulic (Category Drama) 2009
“La Tour Lambert” in the Auvergne. Our chef presents a traditional recipe: a deboned lamb shoulder stuffed with a farce double, a double filling.
With great meticulousness he describes how to make the recipe. Time is the least of his considerations. The detail-obsessed chef is both pedantic and serious about his art. He chops and cleans. The studio kitchen is filled with the sounds of sizzling and hissing. The chef carries us off time and again to the Auvergne where on location he explains the very peculiar traditions of central France. But the longer the recipe takes, the more the scepticism of the hearers grows.
Harry Mathews, the master of deception, has already long entangled us in his literary world of the post-modern, where speech and reality are critically proofed for their veracity.
Harry Mathews, born in New York in 1930, lives is Paris and is a member of the legendary “Oulipo” group around Georges Perec. His novels include “Cigarettes” from 1987, and “My Life as CIA” from 2005.
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The Way to Timimoun
Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner
Production: SWR / 2007
Broadcast: SWR / 04.03.2007
Length: 53:46
Awards: Prix Marulic (Category Documentary) 2007
Two young Algerians, Laid (Orestes) and Nadir (Pylades), are travelling 2,000 kilometres south from the coastal regions into the Sahara desert. Laid is being called back to his native village Timimoun to avenge his slain father. Their story takes us on a road trip through Algeria where the two young men experience their country at its most cruel. Along the way, Laid is tormented by the thought of having to kill his mother once they reach Timimoun.
The story told in the dramatic parts of the piece is derived from the novel and film Road to Timimoun by Michael Roes, which is inspired by the ancient Greek trilogy of The Oresteia by Aeschylus – Orestes and Pylades are on their way to avenge the death of Agamemnon who has been killed by his wife Clytemnestra. Roes transports his modern version of the ancient and bloody storyline into Algeria, a country that has been ruled by terror and violence and onto a society that is dominated by a rigid patriarchal Islamic system. The further south their journey takes the two young men the more they enter an archaic world ruled by tradition, religion and a rigid patriarchal system.
At the end Laid decides to not take the path tradition calls for and returns to the north. At the same time the story asks a more general question about the emancipation of a young person – will he fulfil the expectations of family and society or will he choose his own path?
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EXIT
Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner
Production: DeutschlandradioKultur / ORF / 2008
Broadcast: Deutschlandradio Kultur / 24.05.2008
Length: 54:05
In Switzerland for the last 25 years organizations dealing with patient-assisted suicide are in existence. The Swiss ethics commission supports the right for self-determination up to the last day – not only for its citizens but also grants this right to foreigners. For this Switzerland is worldwide the only country having such a liberal attitude. A kind of ‘suicide tourism’ to Switzerland is the result of this unique rule.
Together with Holland, Belgium and Oregon in the US, Switzerland is at the forefront concerning the liberalisation of euthanasia.
EXIT is one of the main organisations in Switzerland and the focus of this documentary.
How do these organisations work? How do they deal with the moral, ethical and even religious aspects of their actions? The documentary looks into the philosophies of Seneca and Michel de Montaigne and shows how this liberal way of thinking from the past finds its way into our modern era. How, as a result of our modern medical achievements, the thinking of these philosophers becomes suddenly relevant again.
In dialogues with patients, doctors, EXIT employees, a contemporary philosopher and two Protestant ministers, the piece unfolds these liberal and revolutionary insights into one of the last taboos of our time: the right to your own death.
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