With David Soul, Hugh Burns, and Adam Feinstein

Sunday, September 6, 2015

David Soul is thrilled to return to the The Watermill stage after a ten-year absence, previously in John Doyle’s production of Mack and Mabel. Joining David is Hugh Burns, a guitarist who has worked with a cross-section of artists — from lead guitarist for George Michael to recording with Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Gerry Rafferty, to Placido Domingo (among many others), as well as with producers George Martin and Tony Visconti. His guitar has been featured in many film and TV soundtracks, as well.

Writer, poet, and translator, Adam Feinstein is the author of the acclaimed biography, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life (published by Bloomsbury in 2004, updated in 2013). He writes for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and broadcasts regularly for the BBC.

PRICES: £15 and £14.50. CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKETS.

The restaurant will be open before the event. Please reserve a table when booking your tickets online or with the box office on 01635 46044.

Regarded by colleague and critic alike as “the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language,” Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. Few artists have, over a lifetime, enriched the lives of so many the world over. The raw sensuality and tenderness of his love poetry, the surreal simplicity of his celebration of all things ordinary, the power of his epic poetry and his passion for social justice, his unwavering solidarity with the oppressed and exploited, is testimony to a man whose life’s work remains as vital today as it ever was.

Neruda’s own life story is as extraordinary as his poetry. Poet, diplomat, senator, champion of the working man, citizen of the world, lover and bon vivant — he wrote what he lived and lived what he wrote. At his core, he was a Chilean patriot — a fact made the more poignant when one considers that for his outspoken opposition to an oppressive dictator a price was put on his head that forced him into hiding and ultimately to flee, on horseback, over the Andes. His life and his art were inseparable and his passion for both is contagious.

His close friend, Federico Garcia Lorca, assassinated in the days leading up to the Spanish Civil War, memorably referred to Neruda as “closer to blood than ink.”