Output details

"A Soldier and a Maker"

"A Soldier and a Maker" is based on source material from Gurney’s pen: his poetry, his music and his letters. This range is extended by the recorded memories of his friends. The result is a dramatic piece that seeks to provide a biographical context to Gurney’s work. The research imperative here was to place his art works – poems as well as songs – within the life that urged their creation. Through this method the researcher sought to enrich the audience’s understanding and appreciation of the work of this neglected British poet and composer.

The research process included the selection of material: songs, poetry, contemporary accounts of conversations, Gurney’s personal letters, and finally his appeal letters written in an attempt to be freed from the asylum in Dartford in which he spent his final years. The researcher added sufficient newly written material to provide coherence to the unfolding of the artist’s life. The resulting theatrical “research output” therefore presents in a novel way a life narrative that is more autobiographical than biographical but which allows the audience to evaluate Gurney’s work within his own troubled times and traumatic places.

Gurney’s work is generally dislocated in subject matter from the time or place of its creation, so, for example, he writes of the English countryside whilst in the trenches of the first world war. "A Soldier and a Maker" does not attempt to mend that dislocation but rather to illuminate the discontinuity that energised Gurney’s creativity.