The Dark Tower is a 1946 BBC Home Service radio play written, in verse, and produced by Louis MacNeice, with music composed for it by Benjamin Britten. Dramatist and author Robin Brooks, writing in The Guardian in 2017, called it “a landmark in radio drama”. MacNeice wrote the play in the autumn of 1945. At the time, he was still badly shaken by the wartime death of a schoolfriend, Graham Shepard, and had what might be termed survivor guilt. Britten had previously written the music for MacNeice’s The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936), and Out of the Picture (1937). MacNeice asked Britten to write music for The Dark Tower “with the greatest economy”.