A few words about an odd little (but in some ways huge and epic) audio drama, written by Robin Brooks as an original Radio 3 play but feeling like it has a strong theatrical connection in the sense that I can imagine Simon Russell Beale was probably going to find a way to play Elizabeth I sooner or later. Although technically in
Elizabeth and Essex he's playing the writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, whose writings the play is based on, and reveal him as a drama queen imagining himself as the Virgin Queen while writing his book about her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Strachey has recently become besotted with Roger (Harry Lloyd,) a much younger man who's star-struck by the writer and becomes hugely fond of him, but clearly doesn't feel anywhere near as strongly about him as the older man does, and who is gradually drawn away from Strachey as he falls for fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the economist John Maynard Keynes (Julian Harries.)
