An account of the Lisbon earthquake of All Saints' Day, 1755, and of its philosophic consequences
Written by Francis Watson
Produced by Douglas Cleverdon
The Man of Reason....Carleton Hohbs The Man of Feeling Hugh Burden M. de Voltaire. ....Robert Farquharson M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Robert Eddison
Alexander Pope. .......Robert Beaumont Si.Uer Kitty Witham....Molly Lawson Fellows of the Royal Society:
Godfrey Kenton. Deryck Guyler , and Frank Duncan
Eye-witnesses: Robert Marsden.
Charles E. Stidwill , Cecil Bellamy. Neville Hartley , and John Wood
It is exactly two hundred years since a disastrous earthquake destroyed a great part of Lisbon. Voltaire's poem on the catastrophe and Rousseau's reply illustrate its cataclysmic effects on the 18th-century Philosophy of Optimism.
(Hugh Burden is in ' Wailing for Godot at the Criterion Theatre, London; John Wood broadcasts by permission of the Directors of the Old Vic Trust)