Angela Readman Kills The Witch …

… Or does she?

“Hansel still swears it was the sweetest cottage he ever saw, and the peeling paint on the door looked like frosty angelica. I’m not so sure.”

Script and red radio. [Photo by Angela Readman]

These words are spoken by Gretel, and come from Angela Readman’s forthcoming radio story, The Night We Killed The Witch. Unlike many re-workings of fairy tales, this relies on neither a shift to the present nor to a fantasy future. (Thankfully, Hansel And Gretel: Witchhunters this ain’t.) Instead the setting is timeless and the language connects entirely naturally with the living earth: it reaches out, albeit from a distance, to the spirit of the Brothers Grimm version, or even the medieval tale – developed out of the Great Famine – that some believe was their original source. Equally, you can find modern resonances in tales of refugees, and the story is shot through with a contemporary emotional intelligence.

I’ll give you a small spoiler: Hansel and Gretel’s parents – usually depicted as a weak father and evil stepmother – more closely resemble the rest of us, except that they are caught between a large granite boulder and well-hard hard place. To find out the rest, please listen.

Angela Readman first blinked on our radar a while ago when she submitted a story for our Time Being new writing showcase. She was earmarked for broadcast, only for the series to be decommissioned. But a reading of the title story from her recent collection Don’t Try This At Home – in which a woman subdivides her boyfriend like a worm under a sharp spade – was enough to be reminded that her radio debut was long overdue.

Photo by Wolf Marloh. [By permission of Bryony Hannah]

The Night We Killed The Witch is read by Bryony Hannah. As I’ve said before – Bryony is already a byword for reading excellence, as her previous work with us more than demonstrates (Closer by C.D.Rose; The Last Train by Jo Baker; No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July and We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson). Here, she not only grasps Angela’s emotional intelligence but adds another layer of her own.

At a time when more (not less) is more; when the world seems to be dominated by those who shout or those who respond to the shouting, it has never been more important to defend small things like the short story and to keep our ears pricked for the softer sounds of quiet intelligence and heart. Whether with live radio or using iPlayer I hope you’ll ring-fence a quiet space to listen to this, and let two superior storytellers transport you.

The Night We Killed The Witch – specially-commissioned by Sweet Talk Productions for BBC Radio 4 – goes out on 3 March at 3.45 pm and is available thereafter on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.