Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world.
Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction.
And yet - despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers - she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in.
Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022.
Based on ten years of surveys and excavations in Nyiyaparli country in the eastern Chichester Ranges, north-west Australia, Crafting Country provides a unique synthesis of Holocene archaeology in the Pilbara region. The analysis of about 1000 sites, including surface artefact scatters and 19 excavated rock shelters, as well as thousands of isolated artefacts, takes a broad view of the landscape, examining the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space. Heritage compliance archaeology commonly focuses on individual sites, but this study reconsiders the evidence at different scales - at the level of artefact, site, locality, and region - to show how Aboriginal people interacted with the land and made their mark on it.
Crafting Country shows that the Nyiyaparli 'crafted' their country, building structures and supplying key sites with grindstones, raw material and flaked stone cores. In so doing, they created a taskscape of interwoven activities linked by paths of movement.
Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Clytemnestra must try to stop him, Iphigenia must accept her fate, the Chorus must watch.
Ships lie dormant in harbours, and thousands of troops sit on the shore, growing restless and unruly. Helen is gone, and pursuit of her has been stalled by windless seas. To raise the winds to send his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon is commanded by the gods to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. But his deceit of his wife, Clytemnestra and the killing of his child, will end up tearing him and everything around him to pieces. Euripides' story of a father moved to murder his daughter, Iphigenia at Aulis, is one that has been reinvented and retold anew throughout history. The Iphigenia Quartet sees four of the UK's most exciting and radical playwrights - Caroline Bird, Suhayla El Bushra, Lulu Raczka, and Chris Thorpe - create explosive responses to this classical tragedy. Each play is a reimagining this story of familial catastrophe from the differing perspectives of the key characters in the play: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and the Chorus.