Housewife Annie Marsh suspects her husband might be The Hawk, a brutal serial killer. Complicating matters is the fact that she once was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. When she discovers she does not have the happy marriage she always believed and begins to piece together the times and dates of her husband's frequent absences, her fears begin to take hold, and her sanity deteriorates.
In a final battle for the control of Thebes, Oedipus's two sons kill each other. Creon issues an order that no one is to bury Polynices upon pain of death. But Antigone is determined that her brother's body will have the proper rites of burial.
Oedipus's wanderings come to an end when he finds his final resting place, as foretold by the gods. But his brother-in-law and his son each try to take him away.
Plagues are ravaging Thebes, and the blind fortune-teller Tieresias tells Oedipus, the King, that the gods are unhappy. The murder of the former king has gone unavenged, and Oedipus sets out to find the killer.
An Irishwoman married to a German in pre-First World War Liverpool, prepares to meet her brother-in-law - a young man named Adolf Hitler. Years later she is interviewed on television about her life. Part of the BBC2 Playhouse strand.
Helena loves Bertram, but he's of noble birth, while she's just a doctor's daughter. But Bertram is at the court of the King of France, who is ill, and Helena has a remedy that might cure him and win her the right to marry Bertram. But does Bertram want to marry her?
A family conflict ensues after Owen, the youngest of the proud military family Wingrave, expected to continue the family tradition and become a soldier, rejects violence and war and proclaims himself a pacifist.
This 1969 BBC production is about as close as we can get to a definitive version of Benjamin Britten's PETER GRIMES, one of the greatest 20th Century operas. The story of the individualistic fisherman hounded by his neighbors who believe he murdered his young apprentice packs tremendous emotional power. The compelling narrative is richly enhanced by its subtexts: the lone outsider versus the conformist mob; the dreamer of improbable dreams that lead to tragedy; the artist (dreamer) versus the Philistines, and the homosexual overtones of Grimes' abuse of his child apprentices. Britten is conductor of his work and tenor Peter Pears is Grimes, 25 years after he created the title role at the opera's premiere. As the widow Ellen Orford, soprano Heather Harper is magnificent. Best of all, the sea is an ever-present actor here. When we don't see it in the background it exerts its presence in the abundant visual references to nets, barrels, and other paraphernalia of a seaside fishing village.
