What would you sacrifice to write the book everyone wants to read?
In this edition of The Saturday Night Theatre Companion, we return to the BBC’s 1982 radio drama The Fatal Flaw, written by Chris Allen and starring Martyn Read as Matthew Bradford—a writer confronted by the seductive promise of literary success.
This Deep Dive includes Spoilers. We invite you to listen to the original play below first then return for our in-depth discussion.
We explore the play’s world of writers and publishing, its performances and radio craftsmanship, and the larger questions lurking beneath the story: What happens when ambition overtakes integrity? Can success become its own kind of failure? And where, exactly, does the fatal flaw lie?
We’ll begin spoiler-free before moving deeper into the drama and its conclusion—and consider why this largely forgotten radio play remains worth hearing more than forty years later.
The Saturday Night Theatre Companion is a Chesterton Radio Original, revisiting the great radio dramas of the past—not simply to remember them, but to discover what they still have to say.
From the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas.
