THE DARK EARTH & THE LIGHT SKY

This is the first really good play I've seen for a while. It is the story of Edward Thomas, a poet writing at the time of WW1, seen through the eyes of his wife, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and his father. It's an excellent script written by Nick Dear. I've just read the review by Michael Billington in the Guardian which nicely summarises much of my own views so rather than repeat less eloquently, I'm reproducing it below. It's made me keen to read Thomas's poetry.
Oh, Billington doesn't mention the superb lighting design by Peter Mumford. Peter lived in the same village and our children went to the same school. We've lost touch now but it's great to see he's still producing great work.

'.... Nick Dear overcomes the difficulties in this probing, intelligent piece about Edward Thomas, who produced a formidable body of work between 1914 and his death at Arras in 1917. Dear makes no attempt to disguise the jagged awkwardness of Thomas's depressive personality; what he does is explore the impulses that drove Thomas to write, in a way that makes you want to reread the poetry itself.
Avoiding the traps of the bio-play, Dear presents Thomas's life from multiple perspectives. To his free-spirited wife, Helen, appalled by his decision to enlist in the war in his late 30s, he was a source of anguished passion. To his mentor Robert Frost, who shared his vision of a poetic diction hewn from everyday speech, he was someone driven less by a death wish than a desire to test his own worth. To his adoring friend, Eleanor Farjeon, he was someone who found his inspiration in a harsh, accidental nature. But, although it offers a welter of explication, Dear's play leaves us free to make up our own minds about Thomas. What we see is a fractious figure who inspires great love, a cricket-loving traditionalist who becomes a poetic modern, a patriot who apparently seeks his own death. There's a perpetual mystery about Thomas that the play rightly never resolves.
Even if there is an ambivalence about Thomas's personality, there is absolute clarity to Richard Eyre's excellent production: against a Bob Crowley backcloth that beautifully reflects the shifting colours of an English sky, we witness Thomas's seemingly inexorable progress towards death. Pip Carter, as the poet, is both the obsessive note-taker about nature and a haunted figure communing with some unseen spirit. Hattie Morahan brilliantly conveys the fraught sensuality of his wife, and there is good support from Shaun Dooley as Frost and Pandora Colin as the devoted acolyte. By modern standards, it's a quiet play – but it poignantly reflects the contradictions of a poet whom Ted Hughes called "the father of us all".'

1. The Dark Earth and the Light Sky
2. Almeida,
3. London
4. Until 12 January
5. Box office:
   020-7359 4404
6. Full details