Doing The Inferno

A verse play by Sean O'Brien:
Rehearsed Reading at The 16th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival: 6.11.04.

A rehearsed reading by Alan Howard and Bertie Carvel, directed by Tim Carroll, of a brand new two-hander from Sean O'Brien, specially commissioned for the Festival. Contemporary drama bringing rhyming couplets bang up to date. Following the performance, Sean will take questions from the audience.

In this black comedy two travellers wait in the November dusk to be collected from Saxmundham railway station on their way to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. (No resemblance is intended to the actual Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, which is almost eerily efficient).

Densmore is a severely grand poet of sixty-odd, who has spent the last fifteen years apparently working on a translation of Danté's Inferno.

Stark is a poet with a first book out. Or is he?

Poetry, translation, identity, sex, fame, rival poets, critics, sin, arts administration and metaphysical comeuppance are just a few of the topics with which the pair beguile the gloomy hour.

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