The Chipping Campden Literary Festival to be held in May has released more details of its event entitled “Scoop: We Need to Talk About Evelyn”. This is scheduled for Friday, 10 May at 830pm in the Chipping Campden School Hall. The festival’s release is copied below:
“Scoop is often cited as the best comic novel about journalism, and its author Evelyn Waugh, one-time correspondent on the Daily Mail, might just as appropriately have called it “Fake News”. It remains as relevant and funny today as when first published in 1938. Sam Walters and Auriol Smith read from this classic novel, and Martin Stannard and Duncan McLaren (with historic photographs and press cuttings) present their own take on it, and discuss the two very different directions Waugh studies are going in the twenty-first century.
Duncan McLaren is the self-styled Doctor Who of the Waugh universe: his ongoing engagement with Evelyn takes him all over the place including Crete to revisit the culmination of Officers and Gentlemen. As well as being author of Evelyn!:Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love Duncan has written Looking For Enid: the Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton.
Martin Stannard, FRS of Literature and the English Association, and Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester, has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh –The Critical Heritage and a two-volume biography – and is Co-Executive Editor of OUP’s The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, editing Vile Bodies for this. Other works include the 2009 biography of Muriel Spark and the Norton edition of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
Auriol Smith, actor, theatre director, and founder member and former associate director of the Orange Tree Theatre, has also directed in the West End, regional theatres and at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
Sam Walters MBE, educated at Merton College Oxford, trained as an actor at LAMDA. He retired in 2014 as Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London which he founded in 1971 and ran for 42 years! He also directed in the West End, in many regional theatres, and at drama schools.”
For details about tickets and other relevant information click here.
