Leaving - a new play by Richard Bradbury.Jack has lived in the same place all his life but now he is being pushed into leaving. His powerful attachment to the land, though, brings with it contradictory emotions that can only really be explained by understanding his past. "Leaving" is about the fierce passions provoked by a sense of being rooted in a locality. Jack's love for his farm and his rage at what has happened to it over the last 40 years is tempered by the knowledge that the place also has him and his family caught in its tight, almost suffocating embrace.
April 30th and May 1st, 7.30pm at the White Hart, Woodbury, Devon. Tickets £8 from Joel Segal Books / phone 07917 850258 / or e-mail riversmeetplays@btinternet.com
From the flyer: Richard's novel Riversmeet, about the ex-slave and anti-slavery and social campaigner Frederick Douglass, won an "Exclusively Independent" award earlier this year, and his last play, Become a Man, was commissioned in 2007 by the Greater London Authority as the first play to be performed in the new City Hall. It went on to play to sell-out audiences at the Hackney Empire. He is currently writing a new play, Blood Meadow, about the 1549 Cornwall and Devon rebellion.
- Ray
Very interesting, Ray. I went back to your review of Riversmeet since Douglas is so present in my region (they are trying to put a statue of it on the Courthouse lawn but continue to encounter much opposition). It also brought up the Chartist movement whose demands seem to me to be pretty non controversial though it sounds like they got squashed pretty soundly, particularly at Monmouthshire. What interests me most is how all these things sort of intertwine to produce History.
ReplyDeleteDouglass seems rather under-rated as a historical figure; I think the problem is his multi-focus radicalism. He didn't just conveniently limit himself the expected role - escaped slave poster-boy - but got into areas such as female suffrage (and involvement with Victoria Woodhull's nomination for the presidency) that were antagonistic to many even within the Northern US political consensus. Same when he came to Britain: they were expecting a standard anti-slavery line, and it probably shocked a lot of people that he supported the Chartists and the cause of Irish independence.
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