A Celebration of Sussex Poetry at Shoreham WordFest

To mark this year's National Poetry Day, the show promises a trip through time as we meet some of the county's most acclaimed wordsmiths. Performances will be at Marlipins Museum from October 3-5.

Hilaire Belloc, illustrious poet and wine-enthusiast, will be your host for the evening as he introduces us to three other writers to celebrate some of Sussex's best-loved poems and the stories behind them. Sharing the stage with him will be Edmund Blunden, Charlotte Smith and Mary Collier. Expect tales of wartime, cruel crime… and just a little bit of rhyme.

The show has been put together by writer and producer Ethan Taylor as part of Shoreham WordFest in association with Marlipins Museum.​​

“We have struck up a lovely relationship with Shoreham WordFest and Marlipins Museum over the last couple of years,” Ethan said, “And we have visited with our last couple of shows. This year they approached us and they told us that they wanted to choose the subject, and being a literary festival, they said they wanted something that would celebrate National Poetry Day which is on the Thursday before we open our show.

“The whole remit of Half-Time Orange is we are a theatre company that produces theatre grounded in history. We want to delve into Sussex history and I started this through reading reams and reams of Sussex poets. I am lucky enough to have picked up a few Sussex anthologies over the years and I was also very kindly gifted a book on Sussex literary figures and so I chose four characters, four poets, and we see them on stage. They talk about their poetry and their motivation and they offer some of the poems as themselves.

“Hilaire Belloc is a larger than life character. He is self-described as a wine enthusiast, and it's incredible the number of poems that he wrote about wine, drinking and ale and burgundy. He also brings a real sense of humour to it all. And he gives us a real celebration of the art of poetry itself.

“Edmund Blunden was a First World War poet and he was a young man when he returned from the war. He had seen the horrors and the torments and that's reflected in his poetry. The narrative is that Belloc has invited Blunden to give a talk on poetry but Edmund Blunden is struggling to reconcile the meaning of art and poetry and literature in the wake of so much destruction during the war…”

As for Mary Collier, she was a “fantastic figure. She was a Sussex and Hampshire laundress/washerwoman and she was one of the first published poets to really identify with the working classes.”

Collier dated from the mid to the late 1700s; Charlotte Smith was just a little bit later: “She is another great figure but she had a very tragic life. She was born into quite an affluent family but her father spent most of his fortune and then married her off and she and her family ended up in the debtors’ prison. She used her poetry to buy their freedom.”