Poet’s abandoned script adapted as radio drama

The Welsh poet and playwright prepared a treatment of the Robert Louis Stevenson short story The Beach Of Falesa but it never made into production.

Now the radio station is planning to broadcast his words in May as part of a celebration of the centenary of Thomas’s birth, with casting still to be finalised.

His play was only published posthumously as a novella in 1963. The late great actor Richard Burton – who famously voiced Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and has a strong association with the writer in the minds of many fans – went on to purchase the rights and was in discussions with Christopher Isherwood to develop it further but the plan appears to have been abandoned.

Stevenson’s story about intrigue among colonial traders on a fictional South Sea island was originally published in 1892 and was written after he moved to Samoa.

Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said: “It is a great great story – it is Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas. It’s a really curious subject for Thomas to have decided to do a film script about because it’s almost like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness before Conrad – a fascinating subject.”

Head of speech programming at Radio 3 Matthew Dodd said: “It’s a dark story, it’s very tense and I can’t imagine what the film producers were looking for. To me it works fantastically well as a radio drama.”

The play will be aired on May 4.