Thursday 14th January 7.00 p.m.

DICKENS ASKS FOR MORE

Written and performed by Michael McEvoy

Directed by Jennifer McEvoy

Dickens Asks for More presents a delightful array of the most vivid, surprising and entertaining of Dickens’ unforgettable creations. In viewing this gallery of "sketches" we find they hang together as witnesses to some of the most important social changes that took place in Victorian England.

Dickens encouraged, and occasionally initiated, these changes by forcing his readers to look up from his books, to see beyond their immediate environment, and to confront the injustices occurring in the society around them. In opening his readers’ eyes to harsh reality, Dickens became an agent of change in nineteenth-century England.

The sweatshops, the forced labour, the starvation wages, the child slavery have not gone away. The half-starved child creating an intricate, hand-stitched garment for a pittance is no longer two or three streets away from the eventual wearer, but a continent or two. In a global economy, Dickens still has a relevant message. Dickens’ world is our world still.

Dickens was steeped in theatre. He knew how to put a point across to an audience, using the traditions of both comedy and tragedy to maximum effect. This solo performance, displaying Charles Dickens’ most fantastical, comical and larger-than-life creations, is brimful of both.

Michael has performed several of his one-man shows at the bookshop: pieces on the lives of Orwell, Shakespeare and Machiavelli. This is only the second outing for Dickens Asks for More; it was premiered at the World Performing Arts Festival Pakistan in 2008.

Thursday 21st January 7.00 p.m.

SIR ALLEN LANE: CREATOR OF PENGUIN BOOKS

Sir Allen Lane (1902–70) was one of the great innovating publishers of the twentieth century, and the man responsible for bringing the paperback revolution to Britain. Jeremy Lewis, author of a biography of Lane, discusses the man’s life and work.

After leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965, Jeremy Lewis spent the first half of his career in book publishing: he worked for Collins, Andre Deutsch, A.P. Watt (the literary agents) and Oxford University Press, and was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus for ten years. He has been a freelance editor and writer since 1989. He has written biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books; Shades of Greene, a group biography of Graham Greene’s siblings and first cousins, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2010. He has written three volumes of memoirs, Playing for Time, Kindred Spirits and Grub Street Irregular, published by HarperCollins in 2008. He has been the commissioning editor of the Oldie since 1997, and the editor-at-large of the Literary Review since 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is on the Committee of the Royal Literary Fund. He is married with two daughters, and lives near Richmond Park.

Thursday 28th January 7.00 p.m.

NICHOLAS HAGGER'S OVERLORD

The poet Nicholas Hagger introduces a selection from his great blank-verse epic about the Second World War.

NICHOLAS HAGGER is one of the most prolific writers today, having penned more than thirty books. Overlord – Triumph Of The Light 1944–45 is an epic poem describing the Allied victory against Germany in the closing years of the Second World War, from D-Day to Hiroshima. Hagger wrote the poem after having been encouraged to attempt epic verse by Ezra Pound.

ERIC GALATI is a British and American actor and the founder of the Vortex Theatre Company, which he created with director Alfredo Michelson. He graduated from the Guildford School of Acting and went on to perform with various theatre companies here in Britain between 1993 and 2003. For the past six years he has resided in New York where he has been the Director of Creative Acquisitions for Garbitelli-Mansfield Productions.

Thursday 4th February 7.00 p.m.

TRILBY: GEORGE DU MAURIER’S MASTERPIECE

George du Maurier (1834–96), father of Daphne, was himself a painter and novelist who in Trilby (1894) captured the essence of bohemian life in Paris in the late nineteenth century, a time when English painters crossed the channel as much to escape Victorian prudery as to learn their trade. Trilby, one of the most popular novels of the fin de siècle, tells the story of an artist’s model who falls under the influence of the evil hypnotist Svengali. Extracts are read by actors from the Godot Company.

Thursday 11th February 7.00 p.m.

MURIEL SPARK: CATCHING THE PERIOD

One of the most brilliant of post-war novelists, Muriel Spark’s accurate eye caught the essence of her time. John Calder presents a selection of her work.

Thursday 18th February 7.00 p.m.

GWALIA AWAKE!

Dedwydd Jones's One-Man National Theatre of Wales

The English have a National Theatre, the Irish have one (the Abbey), the Scots have one (the Citizen's Theatre, the new peripatetic National Theatre of Scotland), and now the Welsh, at last, have one – the Welsh National Theatre of Dedwydd Jones! Although it is still a one-man show, it is the only one from Wales; the fifth and last national theatre of these islands. It is being borne on a remarkable raft of fifty-six plays, all by a single author. In cahoots with Irish actor Mark Ryan and Scots actor Mike Daviot, Jones himself will read excerpts from the plays and other works. A Welsh national Theatre of Dedwydd Jones? Listen, and decide for yourselves!