Two Waugh-related events have been announced for late next month. Unfortunately, they occur on the same day but do not necessarily conflict:
–The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project in Leicester has announced a reading from a new play based on Brideshead Revisited:
“Easter Bank Holiday weekend and Port Meadow is pullulating with people. Charley Wilson-Ryder is working on her CV when Sabrina Flute vomits all over her picnic blanket…”
Award-winning playwright Sophie Swithinbank presents a rehearsed reading of Even in Arcadia, a new play responding to Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Playwright and cast will be available for a Q & A session immediately following the performance.
Swithinbank’s play was written during her residency with the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project, and you can read about her experiences during its creation on the project blog.
The reading will take place on 30 March at 1830p in The Hayloft at the Organ Grinder, 4 Wood Gate, Loughborough. Tickets are available at this link. For more information about the play and playwright see previous link.
–Not so far away, there is an event earlier that same day at the Oxford Literary Festival that will be of interest. Critic and novelist D J Taylor will appear at a presentation on his recent book The Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-51:
Biographer D J Taylor tells the story of four women from the generation of ‘lost girls’ – the missing link between the first wave of newly liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the free-for-all of the 1960s.
Taylor says there were at least a dozen or so young women in Blitz-era London that could qualify for the title, but he concentrates on four – Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. They were chic, glamorous and bohemian members of English literary and artistic life of the 1940s. Three had affairs with Lucian Freud, one married George Orwell, one became mistress of the King of Egypt and all were associated with the celebrated literary magazine Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. They had affairs with dukes, celebrity divorces and appeared in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford…
The book is described in several recent posts and will be reviewed in an upcoming issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies. The presentation is scheduled on 30 March at 1400p in St Cross College, Oxford. It should be possible for the very keen to include both events in a single day trip since Loughborough is not a bad drive from Oxford (90 miles via M40/M1) and there are frequent train connections. For details on venue and booking see this link.
