…”You can’t help but be engaged”…Time Out ****

England 1656. The sense of freedom, following revolution and the execution of the King, is still threatening to plunge the country into anarchy.

A picnic in the woods is a very unparliamentary setting for a meeting between two key revolutionaries: the blind poet and the Secretary for Foreign Languages, John Milton and Oliver Cromwell. An unwelcome interruption  leads to a heated debate where the jaded aspirations of those in power and the perfect ideologies of those who sit on the sidelines are called into question.

Once the dust of civil war has settled and the blood of those lives has been washed away, has anything really changed? Has the the dream of a new and better world been compromised by the practical realities of running a country? 

 

There will be a free pre-show discussion about the era, the play and its relevence to current international affairs on Monday 24th October. To book tickets please call the box office on 020 7503 1646.

Through A Cloud features the writer Jack Shephard, who has worked with our artistic director Mehnet Ergen both at Southwark Playhouse and at Arcola Theatre. He is also known for his role in Wycliffe, the hugely successful BBC1 series. Through a Cloud is to be the final play in a trilogy of plays about revolution. His critcally acclainmed first play, In Lambeth, was the first. The play is essentially a debate between William Blake and Thomas Paine on the necessity for revolution. The second play in the trilogy is at present being written.

by Jack Shepherd

Jack began writing in the sixties; comedy sketches mainly and plays that never saw the light of day. A series of devised works followed, starting with The Incredible Journey or Sir Francis Young Husband at the Theatre Upstairs in the late sixties and the culminating with REAL TIME (A Joint Stock Production) in 1982. A succession of stage plays followed including In Lambeth  (1989) and Chasing The Moment a play about jazz musicians in 1994, both plays winning Time Out awards. Comic Cuts was written for Triptych Theatre in 1996, and Half Moon (a paly about artists in bohemian London) was written in 1998 and performed at the Southwark Playhouse.
He wrote several plays for television in the seventies when such a thing was possible and a single play for radio in 1996, Cry Wolf.