Historical Playwrights

Discovering unknown stories of the past greatly appeals, and while novels and non-fiction books, including memoirs, are most prevalent, there are a few creative types who have adapted the accounts for the stage. We have a few at TSL:
Francis Beckett has written about Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister who oversaw the introduction of the NHS and welfare state.
James Kenworth writes about a similar time, telling of When Chaplin met Gandhi in the East End of London in the 1930s.
Clive Greenwood and Jason Wing take us back to a previous century to Shakespeare’s era. The Ballad of Crookback and Shakespeare set in a pub near the current Globe Theatre.
Barbara Towell, has taken a family experience to educate young people about Auschwitz during the Second World War in Aftermath.
Another heart-wrenching experience is shared by Debbie Nagioff in Aberfan, an account of the 1960s mining disaster.
Beatrice Holloway’s From Commoner to Coronet explores how Mary Cole moved into the aristocracy becoming Countess Berkeley in the 18th century.
Until putting this post together, I hadn’t registered on just how many historical plays TSL has published.

And I’m not quite sure whether James Martin Charlton’s two theatrical adaptations of by-gone classics count… he’s adapted William Blake’s Divine Vision and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress for the stage.

The challenge with these historical theatrical depictions is that they generally require large casts but that shouldn’t put you off these fascinating insights to our past.