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"Without light there is no space". Robert Wilson

With twinkling lights dispelling the dark of the season, Fiona Shaw explores theatrical lighting, two hundred years after shows were first gas lit in London's West End.

The history of lighting on stage has been one of dramatic entrances and exits, moments of clarity and revelation, instances of extraordinary transformation and metamorphosis.

For thousands of years, audiences had been spellbound by the ingenious use of mirrors, sunlight and fire... creating indoor theatres in Italy in the hands of light obsessed architects, including Leone di Somi; the use of candlelight in the early modern English theatre is described by delighted witnesses, and it's revealed in the play texts as much as in the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse in London. We'll hear about the brilliant pageants and theatre lighting designs of Inigo Jones, who upstaged his collaborator, the playwright Ben Jonson who fired him, bemoaning how spectacle was stealing the play.

We'll bask in the limelight - a light created by actually heating lime, stride in front of the footlights, originally oil lamps created by 17th-century Italian stage designer Nicola Sabattini. In 1817 the Lyceum, Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres were all lit by gas... We'll hear that actress Ellen Terry persuaded Henry Irving not to switch from gas to the "brutality" of electric lights; we also hear about her son Edward Gordon Craig's preoccupation with lights matched by others, including Adolphe Appia's.

And through the programme we explore our deep, atavistic relationship to light - invisible and material light - and what that means to the space, design, words and... performance on stage, with directors, designers and performers: the contemporary theatre making master of light, Robert Wilson; Deborah Warner and Simon McBurney, lighting designers Paule Constable, Jean Kalman, Peter Mumford, historians Katherine Graham, Martin White, Scott Palmer and Christopher Baugh, actor Edward Petherbridge and artist James Turrell.

A Cast Iron Radio production for ±«Óãtv Radio 3.