Adventures in the Skin Trade

Description

Here we are nibbling away all day and night, Mrs Dacey. Nibble nibble. No sense, no order, no nothing, we're all mad and nasty. Samuel Bennett leaves his home in South Wales to pursue a career in London. Setting out with an attitude of reckless, nihilistic purpose, he encounters a nightmarish city with an assortment of bizarre characters and an embarrassing first sexual experience. Join Samuel as he meanders through this dreamlike world, all with a beer bottle stuck on his little finger. Dylan Thomas's gloriously surreal coming-of-age and unfinished novel is given new life by acclaimed writer Lucy Gough. Originally premiered in Wales in 2014, the adaptation was then performed in both Sydney and Melbourne, Australia in 2015. It is published here in Methuen Drama's Plays for Young People series, pitched at ages 16-18. It features an introduction by Sam Mackie, Head of Drama in the English Faculty at The Peninsula School, Victoria.

Lucy Gough was recently invited to take up the Granada artist residency at the University of California Davis, where she wrote and directed a live radio/theatre piece which was performed and broadcast. She has just been awarded a Creative Wales Award to explore the role of the writer in Physical Theatre. She was also a finalist for the BBC Wales Drama Award 2012 and the Nick Darke Award 2013. Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914. After leaving school he worked briefly as a junior reporter on the South Wales Evening Post before deciding to embark on a freelance literary career. He rapidly established himself as a remarkable personality and one of the finest poets of his generation. 18 Poems appeared in 1934, Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and In Country Sleep in 1952. His Collected Poems was published in 1952. Throughout his life, Thomas also wrote short stories, his most famous collection being Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He also wrote film scripts, was a celebrated broadcaster of radio features and talks, lectured widely in America, and wrote the radio play Under Milk Wood, first broadcast posthumously in 1954.

Lucy Gough has adapted it for the stage and she has created a new play in the unmistakable tones of Thomas . . . What Lucy Gough allows us to hear is the unmistakeable voice of Dylan Thomas grappling with recalcitrant material and providing the audience with entertaining diversion while he struggles. -- Victor Hallett * Theatre in Wales * Dylan Thomas devotees who make the effort to go along will be entranced, amused, and perhaps a little shocked.? -- Othniel Smith * British Theatre Guide * Dylan Thomas's gloriously surreal coming of age (and unfinished) novel about a young man adrift in a nightmarish, nihilistic London is given new life and energy by acclaimed writer Lucy Gough. * Daily Telegraph *