By R.W. Morrell

TPS member, Alan Rosenburg, has had a play written by him on Thomas Paine broadcast at peak listening time on French State Radio. Broadcast in several installments, the play seems to have been extremely well received. The author has since given a talk on Paine to the South Place Ethical Society at Conway Hall, a summary of which will be published in The Ethical Record. It is to be hoped that the BBC may eventually see their way to broadcasting the play.

From MARIE-CLAIRE PASQUIER. 38 RUE DE RICHELIEU. 15001 Paris. 42 96 24 25.

Paris, November 17, 1989

To whom it may concern

Some time in March 1989, I was contacted by France-cultui who wanted my opinion on “Pity the Plumage : A Life of Thomas Paine” by Alan Rosenberg. They thought it would be an interesting piece of work to produce before the end of 1989, the Bicentennial of the French Revolution.

I read the radio play and loved it, and spent the summer of 1989 translating it. Starting on December 4, 1989, it is going to be a series of ten thirty-minute episodes at the “prime time” of 6 PM, and the person chosen to be responsible for the production is a young talented “realisateur” by the name of Claude Guerre. He has worked on it with enthusiasm and, I trust, excellent results, although I have not yet become acquainted with his actual work. But the actors and technicians (among whom a musician) who worked with him were all equally enthusiastic.

This radio play (for which the French title finally chosen is “Tom Paine, citoyan du monde”) has, in my opinion, two main merits: one is the great deal of scrupulous research which went into the piece, with the use of historical document which gives it the ring of truth and authenticity. The second one is its dramatic qualities: the main protagonist, Tom Paine is indeed a “citizen of the world”, but also a man with his weaknesses, his contradictions, his recurrent unhappiness. He was, during his life-time, pursued by his enemies, slandered, put into jail, misunderstood. In a series of dramatic scenes, Alan Rosenberg makes us feel close to his main character, we share some of his dilemmas and disappointments. The freedom given by the medium of the radio allows us to follow Thomas Paine from Thetford, his native place, to America before and during the American Revolution, then to Prance at the time of the French Revolution. A number of secondary characters – among which Tom Paine’s mother and his two wives, an Irishman with whom Tom Paine sails across the Atlantic for the first time and almost dies from typhus, his good friend the publisher Clio Rickman, his ideological opponent the famous Edmund Burke Lafayette and General Washington – provide lively episodes and many different points of view. 

To sum up my opinion, this is a very professional piece of work which should have great success with a French audience. I would not be surprised if it was considered for a television program.