A Thousand Kisses is a new radio play by Frederic Raphael, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, playwright and novelist, author of films from Darling (with Julie Christie,1965) and Two for the Road (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, 1967) to Eyes Wide Shut (Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1999). Built around Catullus's now beautiful, now obscene poetry, the play tells the story of Gaius Valerius CATULLUS's love affair with Clodia, the most beautiful woman in Rome, whom Catullus called "Lesbia" in his torrid poetry. Featuring luminaries of Ancient Rome like Cicero and Julius Caesar, the play brings to life the complex world of patrician Rome as the backdrop for one of the world's most famous romances.
We can live, my Lesbia, and love; and love!
People will talk? Greybeard prudes;
Their chat's worth not a toss.
Suns can set; they they come up again;
For you and me, once our brief light goes out –
It's night forever: sleep, sleep, sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, plus a hundred,
Plus another thousand, plus a hundred,
Then a thousand more, and add a hundred.
Then all our thousands thousanded
Can jumble up the figures, lose the count;
Make sure no sour puss can hiss us,
Or tax us for kissing our kisses and kisses.
Parents are cautioned that this play contains a small amount of mildly obscene language.
