The Plays
The television scriptwriter and playwright Keith Dewhurst adapted Thompson’s trilogy into two plays, Lark Rise and Candleford, which were performed in the Cottesloe auditorium of London’s National Theatre in 1978–9. Dewhurst’s concept was to reflect the familiarity, one for another, of the village inhabitants by staging the plays as a promenade, with the theatre seats removed and the actors, musicians and audience intermingling.
The books describe village life through the seasons of the year, but for the plays Dewhurst selected just two days: the first day of harvest for Lark Rise and the first hunt meet of the new year, a winter’s day in January, for Candleford. For both plays he drew on Thompson’s own introductions to set the scene and, movingly, her reflections on the fates of her characters from the perspective of the future – a future in which many of the boys just depicted had died in war – as a coda. As the plays ended the audience, suddenly torn from their participation in the re-created world, recognised the value of a way of life, close to the land and countryside, that they could never know for themselves. “It is a most extraordinary event...It will send most spectators out wiser and happier human beings...one of those rare theatrical occasions with a genuine healing quality”, wrote theatre critic Michael Billington of The Guardian.
In the same way as Dewhurst was able to draw on Thompson’s words for his text, the musical directors for the productions, John Tams and Ashley Hutchings, made use of traditional songs as the basis for the score. In their arrangements the tunes, by turns stirring, atmospheric and poignant, allowed the audience to move (both literally and figuratively) between scenes. The performers were the Albion Band. A cast recording was released in 1980 and reissued in 2006.
The joint directors of the productions were Bill Bryden and Sebastian Graham-Jones and Flora Thompson (“Laura” in the plays) was played by Valerie Whittington. In the 1978 Olivier Awards Lark Rise was nominated for “Best Play” and “Best Director”, but won in neither category.
In October 2005 the plays were revived by the Shapeshifter company at the Finborough Theatre in London, directed by Mike Bartlett and John Terry.
Read more about this topic: Lark Rise To Candleford
Famous quotes containing the word plays:
“The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man’s bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.”
—James Agate (1877–1947)