'Astronomer's Garden' & 'Beached'

Description

Two plays by "one of our most interesting playwrights" (The Times) THE ASTRONOMER'S GARDEN: "While its base is the vicious rivalry between Astronomer Royal Flamsteed and Halley calculating longitude, its true subjects are class, sex and the real world they cannot catalogue. Hood paints the two, irresistibly, as bombastic old sticks, but the play's real strength is its exploration of relationships, showing how Flamsteed's wife and maid navigate male ego-infested waters." Independent The Astronomer's Garden was premiered at the Croydon Warehouse in 1988 and subsequently revived at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1989. BEACHED: "A couple of young runaways, cast up on the beach of a bird sanctuary, cling to the wreckage of their lives and try to construct some kind of future from the fragments of their emotionally and physically brutalised pasts. Harsh, tender and moving." Time Out Beached was first performed at the Croydon Warehouse and revived 1990 at the Old Red Lion, Islington.

Kevin Hood is a British playwright whose plays include Beached (Croydon Warehouse, 1987), The Astronomer's Garden (Croydon Warehouse, 1988) and Sugar Hill Blues (Croydon Warehouse, 1990). He is also an accomplished screenwriter, most notably for the television programmes Grange Hill and Silent Witness as well as 2007's successful biopic of Austen, Becoming Jane.