What could a group of English Civil War era Levellers, an exploding steam boat in America’s Deep South and macho gangsters on the streets of Chicago have in common?

The answer: playwright Mark Ravenhill.

On Sunday 28th April, a new season of classic plays curated by Mark Ravenhill begins on Radio 3. The first Drama on 3 is a production of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill directed by Mark himself.
Mark explains why he chose these particular dramas:

"It's been a fascinating experience curating a season of plays for Radio 3. I chose three plays by favourite playwrights of mine which I've admired for a long time but which I've never seen in the theatre. Boucicault's The Octoroon, a big, warm hearted melodrama, was written just before the American Civil War and tackles the South and slavery in a surprising way. Caryl Churchill's Light Shining In Buckinghamshire explores the possibilities for radical thought and deed during the English Civil War.

And Brecht's early play Jungle of Cities depicts a poetic and savagely funny struggle for survival in early twentieth century Chicago. In all honestly, I simply chose three plays that I love but as I look at the plays now common themes emerge: civil war, ethnicity, money and power. The team at BBC radio drama have been inspiring and committed colleagues in this venture and I hope listeners will tune in for all three, to see if they share my tastes and to join in the debate which these three plays provoke."

Following on from Caryl Churchill’s play is a production of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon set in America’s Deep South before the abolition of slavery. The drama was recorded in front of an audience at Theatre Royal Stratford East in April. As instructed, the audience responded loudly to the melodrama- listen in to hear some very enthusiastic boo-ing and hiss-ing at Stephen Hartley’s gravel-voiced villain.

Amazingly, The Octoroon had already been performed on stage there during the theatre’s first season in 1885. The season concludes with Bertolt Brecht’s Jungle of Cities, a gangster movie of a radio drama set in Chicago in 1912.

• For more information, interviews and photo galleries for the season on the Drama on 3 web site.
• On the Radio 3 Tumblr, we're publishing three gorgeous playbills for you to download and share. Here's the first, for Sunday's Caryl Churchill drama. Two others will follow.

Simon Russell Beale, Greta Scacchi and Benedict Cumberbatch in studio

Emma Harding has produced and directed Michael Frayn's play about the controversial meeting in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, friends who now found themselves on opposing sides in Hitler's war. Here, Emma describes the concept and the casting ...

I set out to direct Michael Frayn's Copenhagen for radio with great joy - I'd hugely admired Michael Blakemore's original 1998 stage production and Howard Davies' inventive 2002 BBC film version - but also with a great sense of trepidation. How would we turn a brilliant stage play into something that worked as a radio drama? How would I help the actors - and the listeners - navigate some very complex scientific and moral ideas?

But as I read and re-read the play, I began to feel that one of the keys to the piece was Frayn's playful and metaphorical use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The notion of uncertainty runs through the whole drama - the uncertainty and the unsaid within human relationships, the uncertainty and the contradiction of human memory, and the uncertainty - the unknowability - of human motivation. And, in the foreground, is the still unresolved mystery of why Heisenberg went to see Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941.

But a drama about the uncertainty of a character's motivation presents an interesting dilemma to actors and director, who are more used to asking 'why am I doing what I'm doing?' and making a decision one way or another. Fortunately, I had a terrifically bright and engaged cast - Simon Russell Beale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Greta Scacchi - who were more than capable of taking on these mind games.

It's also critical that the actors are confident with the complex scientific ideas that their characters are throwing around the dinner table. I invited the physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili along to our read-through, so that the cast could ask him detailed questions about Bohr and Heisenberg's work. As anyone who's listened to Radio 4's The Life Scientific

will know, Jim's a brilliant expositor of mind-bending ideas, so by the end of the session, we all felt we had some sort of grip on the science that informs the drama.

But the play itself isn't about science. Or rather, it is about science, but it's about science in the context of morality, politics and history. These two physicists are working on opposing sides in a global war and they are both very aware of the potential chain reaction - that their work on the atom could inevitably contribute to the deaths of millions of people.

These are big ideas. But Copenhagen is also an intimate, domestic drama about a friendship between two men and a perceived betrayal.

In Simon and Benedict's portrayals of Bohr and Heisenberg, we worked on creating a real sense of a friendship that has become strained, but that was once incredibly close - the friendship between an eminent physicist and his mercury-witted protégé, or between a father-figure and his adopted son. And Greta, as Margrethe Bohr, presents a fiercely intelligent woman, torn between her inherent instinct towards graciousness and hospitality, and her irritation with Heisenberg.

• Listen to Copenhagen from 830pm on Sunday 13 January
• Find out about Niels Bohr
• More on Werner Heisenberg
• Visit Michael Frayn's webpage at publishers Faber & Faber

Brixton man in the 1980s. Photo: Getty Images

Writer Rex Obano blogs about his forthcoming Radio 3 play, Lover's Rock, set in troubled south London in 1981. You can hear the play, starring Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, at 830pm on Sunday.

In the early hours of the 18th January 1981, fire spread rapidly through a house in New Cross Road, London where Yvonne Ruddock and Angela Jackson were holding a joint birthday party. Thirteen young people died including Yvonne. Later in 1983, the suicide of Anthony Berbeck, who had been at the party and was affected by the memory of that night, brought the total number of dead to fourteen.

The deaths of those young people became a seminal moment in our cultural history. The tragedy, a still unsolved blaze at a house party, and its aftermath of protest and campaigning, set the tone for much that came after. The fact that no one in authority seemed to care forced the black community to unify, to find its voice in a way it hadn't before. It politicised people from all over the country. Thousands marched in protest through Central London. There had been other uprisings, but this was a line in the sand.

At the time of the fire I was in the second year at William Penn Comprehensive School, situated between Brixton and Peckham along the 37 bus route - the events had a profound effect on me. There was a definite shift in attitudes, perceptions and my own sense of purpose. Looking back, I wondered how I coped with what was happening around me. I was a soul boy listening to Luther Vandross and early hip-hop, but it was my sister who broadened my musical horizons by playing Lover's Rock. Lover's Rock was a hybrid of Jamaican reggae and American soul music that was popular in the soundsystems, the radio and on the record players in many a household. It was quintessentially black British and the songs were mainly about the pain of being in love. The success of Lover's Rock singers Donna Rhoden, Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson and Caron Wheeler (of the group Brown Sugar before she found worldwide success with Soul II Soul) suggested that pop stardom was possible for every young girl. While every young man wished they could be as articulate in matters of the heart as Peter Hunnigale and Trevor Walters. But really Lover's Rock gave young black Britons a way to cope with the pain of what was happening on the streets.

That pain became all too real in 1981 and some people have never been allowed to forget the events of that year, particularly those surrounding the fire on the 18th of January. While researching this play I interviewed survivors such as Wayne Haines, and relatives of those who died, such as George and Velvetina Francis who lost their son Gerry that night and still don't know how or why the fire started. With their blessing I organised a commemorative charity event of music, poetry and discussion in 2011 to mark 30 years since the fire, which was hosted by Kwame Kwei-Armah and featured the music of Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson at the Albany Theatre in New Cross. The event was attended by over 500 people, testimony to the strong feelings that live on in the community.

Like the music of the time, Lovers Rock is a play about an era in which black British identity came of age; the politicisation of the rebel generation. It follows two young men after the New Cross Fire - one drawn into the politics and one drawn into the music, but both ending up on the frontline of the Brixton riots. In the aftermath of the August Riots last year many reason were posited as to the cause. Lovers Rock suggests that the reasons may be more complex than David Cameron's view that it was 'criminality, pure and simple'.

Many young people today were borne out of the Lover's Rock experience, but as a musical genre Lover's Rock has remained underground. It still hogs my stereo - this time on mp3 rather than vinyl - and I hope this play will introduce it to this generation as well as the events in 1981 that I, and others, will never forget.

• Visit Drama on 3's Lover's Rock page
  
• Read Rex Obano's career history
  
• Find out more about Lovers rock - the music
  

Broadcasting live radio drama is a seat-of-the-pants exercise. Producer Kate Rowland describes what goes in to this Sunday's Free Thinking Drama from Gateshead's Baltic Exchange ...

Each year the Freethinking drama does two things to me, it gives me a huge creative adrenalin rush, and in equal measure makes me tense, (one with childcare scenarios that rival Heath Robinson constructions, and two with the classic production nightmare where you stand on stage, and absolutely nothing happens.

However this year's drama penned by the brilliant poet and writer Simon Armitage is all going to plan. Like the holiday countdown - passport, tickets, money - with live drama you go script, actors, venue, script, actors, audience. So far so good.

The Torchbearers deals with Simon's fascination with this year's Olympic torch runners, the ordinary men and women on the sidelines of the media circus. Who were they? and what drove them? What's great about the Freethinking drama is the immediacy of the collaboration with the writer, as you are asking them to write about something that is in the ether, that has got under their skin, and that will provoke the audience both in the venue and listening at home to think about how they feel and what it triggers in them.

In creating the characters of Paula, Ray, Colin, Spencer and Chloe, Simon has brought a range of characters to life who surprise and shock us with their behaviour. You think you know someone only to discover that not everything is what it appears to be. But to make a drama work you need actors that can truly inhabit someone else's world. And how lucky are we to have the most fantastic cast to do just that. It is so rare that you are able to cast your ideal but in this case with Kevin Whately, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Mark Benton, Christopher Connel and Philippa Wilson we have the perfect group of strangers, who will bring this new world into being. The Baltic is a wonderful venue to work in as you are surrounded by the most inspiring artworks and the team there are so welcoming. Paul Cargill, the studio manager, has done every Freethinking Drama with me and so knows my foibles! Because when it comes to it we only have a day and a half to rehearse with the actors before we go live on R3 on Sunday November 4^th at 9.00pm, making sure that both the emotional journey and all the technical effects works together .

Everyone involved with the Free Thinking Festival and the production team have all been so supportive, so now it's up to me to make sure that we create the most compelling listen.

• Find cast and production details for The Torchbearers

• Visit the Free Thinking website

• Find out about Radio 3's Drama on 3 programmes