David Pownall’s ‘Assassins’ Radio 4 series is a set of three plays each devoted to a famous assassin from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In each, the roles are limited to just two actors to keep a dramatic focus on the perpetrators themselves in the lead up to, and fall out from, crimes which have earned their perpetrators an infamous place in history.

The series begins with ‘The Virgin Knife’, a depiction of Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat during the French Revolution. Samantha Bond’s excellent performance does its best with a script which, while covering a lot of the main context of the assassination, is clunky at best. The play is structured around a series of conversational monologues as Corday prepares for the murder, first with Corday’s hairdresser and then a cab driver, and culminates in a dialogue sequence with Marat (the only other voice in the play) just before his death. Frequent, repeated references are made to Corday’s virginity (not least with the title of the piece), her menstrual cycle, and her sexual naivety, obsessions that Pownall shares with Jacobin contemporaries, who insisted on having Corday dissected after death to prove (unsuccessfully) that she was not a virgin and committed the murder at the behest of some man. This play twists this narrative so that the man is in fact Marat. Instead of Corday tricking her way into Marat’s house and then brutally stabbing him after surprising him in the bath, Corday is shown as only committing the murder because Marat tells her to, as he has been driven suicidal by his skin disease. Yet despite Marat’s suicidal ill health, the tone of the final bath conversation is decidedly sexual, with Marat confronting Corday with his erection, again drawing on Jacobin ideas (once they’d established that she was a virgin) of Corday as being hysterical as starved of sex. Furthermore, Corday’s famous execution speech in which she cleverly paraphrased Robespierre’s ‘I killed one man to save one thousand’, goes entirely without mention, in contrast to the two male assassins discussed below, both of whom are shown as coherent, philosophical individuals as they prepare themselves for death. While it captures many of the details of the period well, this is a play that falls for every cliché in the book when it comes to female killers.

The second play ‘A mere five thousand pounds’ depicts the assassination of prime minister Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham, a trader who had been wrecked by a five-year imprisonment in Russia due to the inaction of the British ambassador and who believed he was entitled to compensation from the government. This is stronger than the Corday piece in that the conversational monologues are not contained within stilted conversations with silent characters, but are more focused upon Bellingham’s own mindset in the build up to the murder. The structure is a little confusing in that, unlike the Corday piece, the chronology jumps about from scenes from Bellingham’s family life, to the events of the murder itself, to Bellingham’s scaffold behaviour, interspersed with a second series of monologues told from the point of view of Bellingham’s deceased father. However, some nice moments, particularly in terms of the depiction of Bellingham’s relationships with women, make this a more compelling depiction of an assassin.

The third and final play in the series turns its gaze across the pond to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. This play is similar in structure to that of Bellingham, moving between Booth’s family life, the events of the assassination itself, and Booth’s time on the run and eventual death. The pairing of the play of ‘Our American Cousins’ (the play Lincoln was watching) with Booth’s dialogue adds a nice frisson of dramatic tension, as does the dialogue between Booth and his accomplice while they were on the run. This is undoubtedly the strongest of the three, though it is let down at times by the unevenness of the American accents of the actors, which proves distracting.

The overall impression gauged from the three plays is difficult to pin down. Pownall clearly sees each of these individuals as having been driven by powerful ideological beliefs, emerging from their childhoods, which led to isolation and difficulties in personal relationships during their adult years and eventually to the crimes themselves. These are three dramatic moments, delivered with good performances, in which dramatic tension is built nicely, but they are limited by their format and, in the case of Corday, an adherence to a set of clichés. It is a shame that, while both male assassins are depicted in a way that focuses on their political beliefs and personal background, Corday’s crimes are primarily explained through recourse to Freudian ideas of sexuality and feminine weakness.

David Pownall’s Assassins was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra between May 18th and May 20th 2015.