Unicorns, Almost

I wasn't able to go to see this play at the main Festival this year, when it was performed in the Swan - there were too many other things going on!
But after going up to the Edinburgh Festival, and a spell at the Bristol Old Vic, and an audio version that was recorded to be played at Bayeux during the Normandy Landings commemorations, Unicorns, Almost came back to Hay on the last day of the Winter Festival.
It's a one man play about the Second World War poet Keith Douglas, written by local author Owen Sheers, directed by John Retallack, and produced by Emma Balch from The Story of Books in Hay. The chairs had been moved at the front of the tent to form three sides of a square, where the action took place, with a desk, coat rack, boxes and sandbags.
Dan Krikler plays Keith Douglas, with the help of special effects and voices off, some of them quoting lines from Keith Douglas's poetry. He was a tank commander in the Desert War, and some of the descriptions of the dead scattered in the wake of tank battles were graphic. Poets back in England lamented that his poetry was "losing its musicality" - considering what he had witnessed, of course it was!
At the end of the desert campaign, he came back to England to wait for D-Day, when he landed an amphibious tank on the Normandy beaches - and died a week later. He was twenty four. The play ends with one of his poems: "Simplify me when I'm dead", which we got as a handout at the end of the performance.
There was also a question and answer session. When Dan came back on stage, having changed, he commented: "Now I get a mic!" as the entire performance had been him speaking without a mic. Owen Sheers and John Retallack were also taking questions, and said that the play has never previously been performed to more than sixty people - last night there were two hundred and fifty people in the tent, and we were spellbound.
Another questioner asked if there really would be Christmas lights on Oxford Street in the middle of the war, as mentioned in the play, but Owen Sheers said that was a quotation from Keith Douglas's own letters, so it must have been true.
And another person asked if they would consider putting the play on for the Ledbury Poetry Festival.
Owen Sheers said that the play was intended as a kind of haunting, so that Keith Douglas would be remembered, even though his published work fell into obscurity after the war. If he had lived, he could have been one of England's foremost poets of his generation.
It was a wonderful evening of theatre.