The Gloucestershire Youth Players

The common adage is that William Shakespeare sheds a light upon every conceivable human experience and provides us with a universality with which we may all identify. Certainly, his poetry can strike a chord with many, and evoke the whole gamut of emotional responses, much like music. Over thirty years, a son and father with a shared love of Shakespeare, imparted to the younger by the older, write to one another about the common, sometimes overlapping, events of their lives. Over the decades, they thread their nuanced, often unspoken emotions through the lines they pen, never openly acknowledging their feelings other than through inflection and choice of vocabulary; and yet each knows the other. Here we present these poems, some for the first time: a literary, personal and intimate conversation interwoven with a few monologues from their favourite lyricist, Shakespeare. Be prepared to hear words from Hamlet, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing amongst others, and to share in this intergenerational journey, a veritable whirligig of time.

Background Artwork by Jonathan Puddick