On July 25, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater players present A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens on CBS radio's First Person Singular. Cast: Orson Welles (Dr. Alexandre
Manette, Sydney Carton), Mary Taylor (Lucie Manette), Eustace Wyatt (Clerk), Edgar Barrier
(Charles Darnay), Maratin Gabel (Mr. Jarvis Lorry), Frank Readick (Ernest Defarge), Betty
Gard (Madame Defarge), Erskine Sanford (the President). Ray Collins (Prosecutor).
Welles repeated his production on Lux Radio Theater on March 26, 1945.

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From a 2008 review in the UK Guardian (Sue Arnold): "...Orson Welles, resilience and rounded
vowels screwed to the sticking-place, playing both Dr Manette and Sydney Carton in Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities. Why don't they teach actors to pull out all the stops like this any more?"

Kathleen Battles says in her 2013 From Mercury to Mars blog: "The emotional and narrative power
of Welles himself is evident in the Mercury Theater dramatization of A Tale of Two Cities. Taking
on Dickens’ sprawling classic in one hour certainly demanded some creative choices. One was to
open with Dr. Mannette’s letter from the Bastille prison, with Welles as Mannette emotionally
dictating the words that would later serve to betray his own family... This is contrasted against
the later reading of the same letter in a courtroom scene, where the emotional poignancy of Welles’s
performance is counterpointed against its dry reading as a piece of evidence."