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  Poets of the 19th Century The -...

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt...

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  This is a Century for the history books.  The Chinese curse of living in interesting times could not be more suited. 
   
  A small island continued its expansion across the globe bringing both good and evil in its march. Empires clashed. Revolution shook many. The Industrial Age was upon us. 
   
  Poets spoke up against slavery bringing social and political pressure upon an abominable horror. It was also the Age of the Romantics; Shelley, Keats, Byron lyrically rapture.  Tennyson, Arnold, Browning rode a century of sweeping change of dynamism and great verse.

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  Rhinoceros and Other Plays

  Eugène Ionesco

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  “With outrageous comedy” this classic of Absurdist drama “attacks the most serious subjects: blind conformity and totalitarianism, despair and death” (The New York Times). 
   
  In Rhinoceros, as in his other plays, Eugene Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the “movement” is universal. This is not an invasion of wild animals, but a transformation of average citizens into beasts, as they learn to move with the times. As the curtain comes down, only one desperate man remains. 
   
  Rhinoceros is a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition made tolerable only by self-delusion. It shows us the struggle of the individual to maintain integrity and identity in a world where all others have succumbed to the “beauty” of brute force and mindlessness.

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  The Poetry of May

  John Milton, Gerard Manley...

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  MAY - the fifth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and popular for May day and Workers Rights celebrations.   For our poets including Milton, Hopkins, Von Goethe, Wordsworth and Longfellow much else is on their minds and its, of course, its beautifully put. Among our readers are Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe. The tracks are; May - An Introduction; Ode Composed On A May Morning By William Wordsworth; Song On May Morning By John Milton; A Light Exists In Spring By Emily Dickinson; May 1917 By John Jay Thompson; May 1918 By John Jay Chapman; May By Sara Teasdale; In May By William Henry Davies;  May Magnificat By Gerald Manley Hopkins; A Calendar Of Sonnets - May By Helen Hunt Jackson; May Song By Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe; Over The May Hill By Ella Wheeler Wilcox; It Is Not Always May By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; The Young May Moon By Thomas Moore; A Spring Poem From Bion By Eugene Field; To A Primrose By Samuel Taylor Coleridge; To The Daisy By William Wordsworth; By My Sweetheart By Eugene Field; A Nuptial Verse To Mistress Elizabeth Lee, Now Lady Tracy By Robert Herrick; Sympathy By Emily Jane Bronte; May Night By Sara Teasdale; Where Go The Boats By Robert Louis Stevenson; On The Sea By Keats; The Rao Of Ilore by Laurence Hope; Sonnet To Lake Leman By Byron; All Is Well By Henry Scott Holland; The Bride By Laurence Hope; The Gardener By Rabindranath Tagore; Constantinople By Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Late Spring By Henry Van Dyke; The School Boy By William Blake; Roots And Leaves Themselves Alone By Walt Whitman; The Oak By Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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  Switzerland (NHB Modern Plays)

  Joanna Murray-Smith

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  1995, the Swiss Alps. Patricia Highsmith, the queen of the thriller, now ageing and ailing, hides away in her study, surrounded by her collection of books and antique weaponry, finding solace in her seclusion, her cats and her cigarettes.
  A polished young man turns up, sent by her New York publisher to persuade her to write one final instalment of her best-selling series featuring the master manipulator, Tom Ripley.
  But as day breaks over the mountains, it becomes clear that the charming stranger is set on a far more sinister mission.
  Joanna Murray-Smith's play Switzerland is a gripping psychological thriller, filled with razor-sharp dialogue. It was first performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2014. The play received its UK premiere at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, in 2018, before transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End.
  'A riveting psychological two-hander weaved with a compelling black humour' - The Stage
  'A smartly self-referential salute to Patricia Highsmith's riveting crime tales' - Guardian
  'A gripping psychological thriller. Creeps up on you and then has you on the edge of your seat' - Sunday Telegraph
  'Joanna Murray-Smith demonstrates a Stoppardian gift for pithily combining intelligence, wit and pathos' - Independent

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  The Lost World

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John de...

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  Arthur Conan Doyle’s rollicking adventure tale follows a scientific expedition deep into the Amazon jungle – right back into the time of dinosaurs and cave men.  Before Jurassic Park, before Indiana Jones - there was The Lost World! An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Josh Clark, Kyle Colerider-Krugh, Peter Paige, Kirsten Potter, Kate Steele, Tom Virtue, Kenneth Alan Williams.Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.The Lost World is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. Major funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

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  The Poetry of World War I -...

  Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley,...

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  In the War a great volume of poetry was written, produced and published in books, periodicals, newspapers or letters back to home.  We often think of War as a necessity.   We fight for a more just and better world.  We often fail. But in our poets we gain a truth and a morality that shocks us, consoles us and holds our values to the light.  In this volume we hear poems from the front, from home, from soldiers, from auxiliaries, from friend and from foe. 
  War and poetry seem somehow alien to each other.  How can the horror and slaughter of war become any more real and terrifying, visceral and tender in the words of poets? 
  The Great War, World War I, the War to End All Wars, was a stain on humanity and the nations who fought in it.  Millions killed or wounded for aims and principles that, for many, are difficult to accept in the modern age. 
  The poet as a soldier has happened throughout history but not to the level of the men in this volume.  Today we are used to ‘embedded journalists’ who report direct from the frontline. Here we have ‘embedded poets’ who report from the frontline in a unique and inspiring way. Their words, often raw, emotional, angry, despairing yet eloquent, moving, suffused with a hope that we are all capable of more despite the futility and carnage around them. These poets including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, Edward Thomas and several others, including the German Alfred Lichtenstein, lost their lives in the years of war on which they had so eloquently and intensely written.  Their lost lives adding to the toll that war makes us all less whole, less worthy of attaining what we should raise ourselves to be.

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