Dramatisation of the novel by Karen Blixen
BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Serial
Produced/directed by Gaynor Macfarlane
RADIO TIMES EASTER MONDAY CHOICE
“fleeting but vivid impressions…beautifully conveyed…”
Jenny Roper
“Last week’s Out of Africa, starring Emma Fielding, adapted by Judith Adams, directed by Gaynor Macfarlane, was so good I forgot the film. This version understood the magic of a voice, was delicately frugal with music and effects, stole into the mind as if projected straight onto the imagination. It was, in other words, pure radio.”
Gillian Reynolds, The Telegraph
from Episode 5: The Giraffes Go To Hamburg
F/X: BEETHOVEN FADES, AND A KIKUYU BOY SINGING FADES UP SOFTLY, DURING:
KAREN
On my farm in Africa, it happened often in the early morning that a very small herdboy would come into the dining room all by himself, stand for a long time in front of the cuckoo clock, its bird still shut away and silent, and address it in Kikuyu in a slow, sing-song declaration of love, then gravely walk out again.
And I wonder now: If I, too, know a song of Africa – of the giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the oxen ploughing her fields and the dark, laughing faces of my Totos as the bird leaps – will Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that is like me? Will the lions of Ngong, then, watch over me?
