The radio production
of this play, produced by IRDP and broadcast on LBC, won a Bronze
Medal for Best Writing at the International
Radio Festival of New York in 1998. No Gold and Silver medals were awarded
in this category, so this was the highest award for Best Writing in that
year. The Wolf and the Woodcutter was one of the winners of our
London Radio Playwrights'
Festival in 1995 and was universally enjoyed by all our readers
and judges. Here are some of their reviews of the play:
"This
is incredibly entertaining and vastly amusing!! It had me chuckling
and laughing throughout. It's a quite wonderful new look and reworking
of the Little Red Riding Hood, and the 3 Bears, stories and is very,
very ingenious."
"It
is a long time since I laughed so much at a play. The idea is wonderful
and the execution expert."
"Martin
McDonagh is a funny guy. Here, he has a funny premise, funny characters
and some very funny dialogue but he has something more as well - he
has the ability to wrench the comedy around, just when you least expect
it, and take things down a sinister route which will tend to stay in
your head long after the gags have faded away."
"I
enjoyed this play a lot, it is funny, well written and its ending tells
me something which lingers in my mind. I'm not sure what it is yet,
but it is disturbing."
"The
Wolf grows to be an enormously sympathetic character, mostly because
the writer goes to great lengths to make him so. He is doomed from the
start and the professional resignation he exhibits when he realises
this is quite touching. The fact that he has 'a wife and kids' whose
lives he pleads for with his last breath is also most effective."
The Wolf and
the Woodcutter was chosen as one of the five winners of the London
Radio Playwrights' Festival during late 1994 / early 1995, and Martin
attended the awards ceremony which took place at the London Arts Board
in June 1995, along with the other four winners: Fenella Greenfield,
Alistair Roberts, Marcus Lloyd and William George
Q. Martin McDonagh has since gone on to achieve great success
in the theatre, becoming Writer in Residence at the Royal National
Theatre in London in 1995, where he began to write the plays which
are now playing to audiences around the world.
The cast of the
IRDP production of The Wolf and the Woodcutter :
Don
Henderson, Rupert Degas, Liza McLean, Peter
Guinness, Don McCorkindale and Angela Rooks.
