Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In Playback, Marlowe is awakened early in the morning by a phone call from a lawyer. Clyde Umney instructs him to meet the eight o’clock train from Chicago, and shadow one of the passengers. The lady in question, Eleanor King, is beautiful, classy and clearly unhappy. Obediently, Marlowe follows her – all the way to Esmerelda, where she’s going under the name Betty Mayfield and being leaned on by a cheap blackmailer. Stuck doing a sneaky job for people he doesn’t like, Marlowe feels even grubbier than usual: and he’s soon in more trouble than usual too as he comes up against gangsters, hard men and a hitman. Starring Toby Stephens, this exciting dramatisation by Stephen Wyatt retains all the verve of Chandler’s last novel. If was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 26 February 2011.
Author
Stephen Wyatt was educated at Latymer Upper School and then Clare College, Cambridge. After a brief spell as Lecturer in Drama at Glasgow University, he began his career as a freelance playwright in 1975 as writer/researcher with the Belgrade Theatre Coventry in Education team. His subsequent young people's theatre work includes The Magic Cabbage (Unicorn 1978), Monster (York Theatre Royal 1979) and The Witch of Wapping (Half Moon 1980). In 1982 and 1983 he was Resident Writer with the Bubble Theatre for whom he wrote Glitterballs and The Rogue's Progress. Other theatre work includes After Shave (Apollo Theatre 1978), R.I.P Maria Callas (Edinburgh Festival / Hen and Chickens 1992), A working woman (from Zola's L'Assommoir) (West Yorkshire Playhouse 1992) and The Standard Bearer (Man in the Moon 2001). He also collaborated with Jeff Clarke on The Burglar's Opera for Opera della Luna (2004) "stolen from an idea by W. S. Gilbert with music nicked from Sir Arthur Sullivan". His first work for television was Claws, filmed by the BBC in 1987, starring Simon Jones and Brenda Blethyn. Wyatt then went on to write two scripts for the science fiction series Doctor Who—these were Paradise Towers and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Both of those serials featured Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. His other television credits include scripts for The House of Eliott and Casualty. He has worked for BBC Radio since 1985 as both an adapter and an original playwright.
