'"For years afterwards the farmers found them - the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades." So run the blunt, grimly beautiful opening lines of the Welsh poet Owen Sheers's elegy for the men, 4,000 of them from the 38th (Welsh) Division, who were killed or wounded in the Battle of Mametz Wood in July 1916. Sheers revisits that chapter of carnage in a stirring, sprawling promenade show. He draws on the writings of two survivors in particular. One is the poet David Jones whose fractured, enervated, modernist response to his war-time experiences, In Parenthesis, was hailed as a "work of genius" by TS Eliot. The other key influence is the writer Llewelyn Wyn Griffith. driven to wondering how the sun "could shine on this mad cruelty and on the quiet peace of an upland tarn near Snowdon"... We end up in dark woods and a place of numb desolation, bombarded by words that pierce the heart and vignettes that capture the stomach-churning sacrifice. The finest commemoration of the First World War centenary I've seen to-date, this deserves a much longer life.' Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph Mametz by Owen Sheers was premiered by National Theatre Wales in June 2014. It is one of the set plays on WJEC's A level Drama specification. This dual edition combines the original English-language play with a Welsh-language translation by Ceri Wyn Jones, one of Wales's most eminent poets.
A pioneering study by Philip Timberlake, long ignored by mainstream scholarship, revealed the huge difference in the number of lines with feminine endings ...
Questioning the lengths people should go in the name of a cause, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Winter Hill premiered at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, in May 2017.
The Love of the Nightingale
Based on a historical incident.
Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with ...
This classic collection contains a new essay by Alan Bennett, besides the original introductions to A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears and The Madness of King George.
When Lucy, an ordinary teenager, feels ignored by her family, she brings her childhood fantasy friend Zara back to life, only to have her materialize and bring with her a dream family for Lucy
Its greatest pleasure comes from Mr Plummer's taking you step by step through Lear's enormous changes in temperament and insight, and justifying every turn on both an intellectual and gut level. I have never seen an audience so ...
Cast: Matte Osian (Richard), Barry Smith (Bolingbroke), Frank O'Donnell (Gaunt), Kadina de Elejalde (Queen), Robert F. McCafferty (Northumberland), David W. Frank (York). Running time 93 minutes. An independent film shot on a disused ...
This edition also includes useful background information including the Potter family tree and a timeline of events from the Wizarding World prior to the beginning of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.