Name: The Last of Mrs. Cheyney - BBC Saturday Night Theater - Frederick Lonsdale
Uploaded: 2020-09-08T23:52:53+00:00
Duration: 1 h 27 min 30 s
Description: The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is a 1925 play by British playwright Frederick Lonsdale. A popular success in London, England, it was adapted four times as a film, three times in the United States from 1929

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3 years ago

The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is a 1925 play by British playwright Frederick Lonsdale. A popular success in London, England, it was adapted four times as a film, three times in the United States from 1929 to 1951, and the last, in 1961, as a German production.

Frederick Lonsdale's play, about a jewel thief who passes herself off as a society lady, opened at the St. James's Theatre in London on 22 September 1925 and ran for 514 performances. Reviewing the opening night for the Sunday Times, critic James Agate wrote: "It is not a good sort of play, but it is a very good play of its sort." It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1925-1926.

Saturday Night Theatre was a long-running radio drama strand on BBC Radio 4. The strand showcased feature-length, middle-brow single plays on Saturday evenings for more than 50 years, having been launched in April 1943. The plays featured in the strand included stage plays, book adaptations and original dramatisations. For most of its history, programmes ran for 90 minutes and were largely entertainment-centred, such as thrillers, comedies and mysteries.

Saturday Night Theatre was noted as the major drama of the week on BBC Radio 4, until it was scrapped as a programme strand in 1996. Shorter plays continued to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday evenings from 1996 until the relaunch of the channel's schedule in April 1998 by James Boyle, when single dramas were removed from the Saturday evening schedule. Since 1998, the main weekly play on the station has been The Saturday Play, a daytime programme that runs for 60–90 minutes.

There have since been campaigns to bring back Saturday Night Theatre, but in the context of BBC budget cuts, that have included the 2010 axing of Radio 4's Friday Play (established in 1998, when Saturday Night Theatre was abolished), any return looks unlikely.

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