Tony Harrison Plays 6

Tony Harrison's sixth collection includes a foreword by Lee Hall. The book contains Harrison's translation of Euripides's Hecuba, which inaugurated the modern amphitheatre of Delphi in 2005; the remarkable Fram, which opened at the National Theatre in 2008; and Iphigenia in Crimea, after Euripides, which premiered on BBC Radio 3 to mark Tony Harrison's eightieth birthday in 2016. 'Tony is that incredibly rare beast: as great a playwright as he is a poet.' Lee Hall 'I am convinced that Tony Harrison is one of the truly great poets writing in English today.' Melvyn Bragg Hecuba 'Harrison's urgent translation never lets us forget the aching topicality of Euripides' study of the powerful and the powerless.' Guardian Fram 'Harrison brings gloriously rich life to the stage, by turns funny and rending. His couplets are a feast for rhyme junkies.' Financial Times 'As visually resplendent a piece of theatre as you will see all year. The words more than hold their own, however, expressing in rhymes to be relished that poetry might yet, if not lead us out of the darkness, at least make us feel ashamed we're still stuck in it.' Sunday Times Iphigenia in Crimea Set in Sebastapol, 1854, inthe midst of the Crimean war, a lieutenant decides to stage an all-male production of Euripides's tragedy. After initial raucous incredulity, the atmosphere changes as the men commit themselves to the drama until, as it draws to a close, ancient and modern worlds collide and warfare resumes in earnest.

Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. His volumes of poetry include The Loiners (winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Continuous, v. (broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, winning the Royal Television Society Award), The Gaze of the Gorgon (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry) and Laureate's Block. Recognised as Britain's leading theatre and film poet, Tony Harrison has written extensively for the National Theatre, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the BBC, Channel 4, the RSC, and for unique ancient spaces in Greece, Austria and Japan. His films include Black Daisies for the Bride, whichwon the Prix Italia in 1994, The Shadow of Hiroshima, Prometheus and Crossings. Five volumes of plays and his Collected Film Poetry are published by Faber and his Collected Poems by Penguin. His play, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in 2008. Tony Harrison was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize 2009, the European Prize for Literature 2010, the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2015, and the Premio Feronia 2016 in Rome, in special recognition of a foreign author.