Crossing the Bar

Lucy Gough, winner of the BBC Writer of the Year Award in 1994, offers up three imaginative plays. The poetic and evocative Crossing the Bar is set in a cell in the purgatorial Dread, where a nun who speaks medieval English and an inner-city boy share this bleak place. Head is a haunting and savagely funny re-working of a macabre tale from Keats, where Ella retrieves the head of her murdered lover and buries it in a herb pot, and revenges herself on the killer, her brother. Our Lady of Shallot is a dark and thought-provoking play inspired by Tennyson's poem.