Boatman Town, by Glyn Maxwell, after 'The Summoning of Everyman'
£ 7.00
The last day of our sun-soaked hols on a strange island in the Med – and it just had to pour with rain! Yvonn and her friends take shelter in The English Pub, where else? But the service is terrible, the whole place seems dead and Yvonn can hear a child crying… Something bad has happened here, or is it about to happen? And is anyone going to be strong enough, kind enough, good enough, to stop it? One by one Yvonn and her friends will be tested in this modern, drunken, tragicomic take on Everyman, the great medieval morality play.
Glyn Maxwell is a poet, playwright, librettist and teacher. His poetry books include How The Hell Are You, Pluto, Hide Now, and The Breakage, all of which were shortlisted for the Forward or T. S. Eliot Prizes, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His Selected Poems, One Thousand Nights and Counting, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2011, and his epic poem Time’s Fool is in development as a feature-length film with Fox Searchlight. On Poetry, a guidebook for the general reader, was published in 2012. The Spectator called it ‘a modern classic’ and The Guardian’s Adam Newey described it as ‘the best book about poetry I’ve ever read.’ Drinks With Dead Poets, a fictional sequel, followed in 2016.
His latest collection, The Big Calls, is a (not very flattering) study of England now, taking in the UK government’s Covid response, the treatment of migrants, conduct over Afghanistan, police corruption, Grenfell Tower – in the forms of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde. He has recently published an amplification of his well-known guidebook On Poetry, called Silly Games To Save The World, a book about poetry, psychology, politics and philosophy, which can be read for free on Substack.
His plays have been staged widely in the UK and the US. His opera libretti include The Firework Maker’s Daughter, which was nominated for ‘Best New Opera’ at the Oliviers in 2014, and Nothing (both for composer David Bruce) which was nominated for the same prize in the Sky Arts Awards in 2017. He has also written libretti for Elena Langer and Luke Bedford, and for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. His new version of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman premiered in Southampton in the summer of 2023 and toured several port cities of the UK.
Maxwell has taught at the Universities of Warwick and Essex in the UK, at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, The New School and Amherst College in the USA, and is currently Head of Studies on the MA at The Poetry School.