Publisher: Nick Hern Books
A boldly theatrical tale of grief and denial, set against the economic crisis of the 1930s. After years apart, two families come together to rediscover their lost friendship. Instead, they conjure up the spirit of a buried tragedy. Presented by the Tricycle Theatre and Shared Experience, Bracken Moor premiered in June 2013.
A journalist forms the centre of a devastating media storm in James Fritz's urgent, gripping and innovative play. Winner of the Imison and Tinniswood Award for audio drama, 2017 After being staged by Old Vic New Voices in 2015, the version published here was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016, winning both the Tinniswood and Imison Awards for Audio Drama. 'a brilliant piece... It took my breath away' - TelegraphShow book
'…I told you/ I really like your smile./ And to my surprise/ you gave it to me.' This astonishing debut by Beth Calverley takes the umbrella theme of the smile and shares it out – with great generosity and care - among a multiplicity of subjects, moods and meanings. Smiles can be brave, shy, sad, or a lighthouse beam of joy. They can be a mess of countless other things. This subject seems so appropriate to a poet whose presence, way of reaching out to every member of her audience, and most of all her smile, seem to create smiles all around her. Her leaps of imagination take the breath away. Her use of recurring imagery draws a safety-net of light around her listeners and readers. Some of the smiles that inspired poems in this collection are contributed by people whom Beth has met on her adventures with The Poetry Machine. These poems are worthy of your great attention. We dare you not to smile as you read. 'This is a rich, absorbing, heart-warming collection, sensitive to life's pleasures and pains. Beth Calverley makes us attend differently to ordinary things - a single look can be 'a glass of cold water', a room 'a tangle / of buttery light', a smile 'a too- / tight scrunchy'. We should all smile more, and we should all read more poetry. This collection covers all bases!' - Helen Mort Content Warning Go gently. This collection is home to all kinds of smiles. Many of the poems in the collection look at how smiles adapt to challenging times as well as positive ones. They explore experiences of mental ill-health, physical ill-health, grief, loss and trauma as well as joy and connection. There is a full list of content warnings at the start of the book and Beth will share CWs during the event.Show book
Theatre Royal. The very name summons up something of grandeur and eloquence. And it was. Hosted by Laurence Olivier, these big-name productions also included the creme de la creme of acting talents from John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Orson Welles to Trevor Howard, Michael Redgrave, and Olivier himself. They were based on works by the worlds’ leading authors, among them Charles Dickens, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov. These are but a few of whose company we shall be keeping as we raise the curtain on our first installment of theatrical history.Show book
A riveting and savage take on the classic Greek myth of Penelope, wife of Odysseus. It's 11.30 a.m. and already it's thirty-three degrees Celsius. At the bottom of a drained swimming pool, four ridiculous men face their inevitable deaths, and play for an unwinnable love. Fringe First Award, Edinburgh 2010 'Grandiose Penelope...mixes classical myth with a bit of Beckett, as interpreted by Father Ted after watching an episode of Lost' - Sunday Times 'extraordinary theatre... terrifying' - Sunday Independent, Ireland 'among the finest plays Walsh has written' - Sunday Times, Ireland 'a wild, crazy, word-drunk piece that is destined to lodge in the memory... Walsh possesses a truly original theatrical voice' - GuardianShow book
Jack is proud of his work at the Clyde shipyards. His wife, Beanie, who is nursing him through asbestosis, thinks he's a fool. But the real test of their marriage comes when they discover that the dusty overalls Jack brought home for Beanie to wash have poisoned her too. Meanwhile their daughter, Lucy, is struggling; will she be held back by her parents' experience, or will she have the courage to allow romance to blossom with Pete? Frances Poet's play Fibres is a big-hearted, hilarious drama about what it means to entwine our lives with another. A story told by four resilient, witty Glaswegian characters, the play asks can we ever cut the cords that bind us – and who will catch us if we do? The play toured Scotland in 2019, in a co-production between Stellar Quines Theatre Company and the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.Show book
Philip Edward Thomas was born on 3rd March, 1878 at 14 Lansdowne Gardens in Stockwell, Lambeth, which was then a part of Surrey. His family had a rich Welsh heritage. Thomas was educated at Battersea Grammar School before proceeding to St Paul's School in London and then becoming a history scholar, between 1898-1900, at Lincoln College, Oxford. Whilst still studying for his degree he married Helen Berenice Noble in June, 1899, in Fulham, London. Thomas had already decided by this time to fashion a career out of literature. As a book reviewer he reviewed in the order of fifteen books a week and began to be published as both a literary critic, for the Daily Chronicle, and as a biographer. His writing talents also extended to writing on the countryside and, in 1913, a novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans was published. Thomas is also responsible for the shepherding and mentoring of the career of maverick tramp poet W. H. Davies during the early years of the 20th Century. Despite Davies’s years of wanderlust he was encouraged to take up accommodation in a small cottage near to where Thomas, Helen and his family lived at Elses Farm, near Sevenoaks in Kent. Ironically although Thomas believed that poetry was the highest form of literature and reviewed poetry books often it was only in 1914 that he began to write poetry himself. By this time, he was living at Steep, East Hampshire, and his early poems were published under the pseudonym of ‘Edward Eastaway’. The American poet Robert Frost, who was living in England at the time, went to some lengths to encourage Thomas to continue writing poetry. Their friendship became so close that they planned to reside side by side in the United States. Frost's classic poem, "The Road Not Taken", was inspired by his long walks with Thomas and the latter’s indecisiveness about which route to take. Thomas wrote several revered poems. For many his lines on the now abandoned railway station at Adlestrop, written after his train made a stop at the Cotswolds station on 24th June, 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War are his best. Europe was now to be engulfed in a monumental armed struggle and many writers, poets and painters heeded the call to become part of the tide of humanity to serve their countries. Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting without too much difficulty. He was promoted to corporal, and by November 1916 had been commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. Philip Edward Thomas was killed in action soon after his arrival in France at Arras on Easter Monday, 9th April 1917. To soften the blow to his widow Helen, a fiction was concocted of a "bloodless death"; that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave from an exploding shell as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body. (It was only decades later that a letter from his commanding officer, Franklin Lushington, written in 1936, was discovered stating that Thomas had been "shot clean through the chest".) W. H. Davies was devastated by the death and his commemorative poem "Killed In Action (Edward Thomas)" is a moving tribute to the loss of his friend. Thomas is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Agny in France (Row C, Grave 43). As a poet Thomas’s career was short but he has been grouped with the War Poets though his output of war poems is short in number, especially when set against those that feature the countryside. Aside from his poems and a novel Thomas wrote frequent essays and a number of travel books. On Armistice Day, 11th November, 1985, Thomas was among the 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.Show book
