Details

I have come to the conclusion that the manuscript must be destroyed and not get into the hands of strangers. London 1920s. The Welsh poet W.H. Davies turns 50 and decides it is time he found a wife. Rejecting respectable womanhood, he searches at night among the city's prostitutes and streetwalkers W.H. Davies (1871-1940), the hugely popular author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, over 600 poems (What is this life if, full of care/We have no time to stand and stare), 6 volumes of autobiography and 2 novels, was acclaimed by both the public and the literary circles of his day. He was encouraged to write by Bernard Shaw, and formed long-lasting friendships with the Sitwells, Walter Sickert, Aldous Huxley, Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon. After his death, Osbert Sitwell observed that no-one who knew him will, or ever could, forget him: nor will anyone who knew him ever be able to recall him without a smile of pleasure and regret, without tenderness, and without gratitude for a character that was no less remarkable in itself than in the genius it supported and nourished. Yet he also secretly described his encounters with women of questionable virtue in an anonymous memoir, naming the book after the mysterious 23-year-old he had come to love - Young Emma. The memoir is unflinching in its descriptions of Davies strange romances, his venereal disease and Emmas secret past. So honest, in fact, that Davies decided to withdraw it from publication and destroy it, for fear of damaging his and his lovers reputation. He thought his extraordinary story would never be told. But one copy of the manuscript was hidden in a publishers safe, only to be discovered decades later when all its characters were dead. That story is now brought to the stage.

Creatives/Company

Author: W.H. Davies
Producer(s): Bright Angel, Concordance
Adapted by: Laura Wade
Director: Tamara Harvey
Design: Gabriela Csanyi-Willis
Lighting: Emma Chapman
Music: Owen Leech