Hay Festival presents T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' with music by Nick Roth

Directed by Adrian Dunbar, music composed by Nick Roth, featuring the voices of Anna Nygh, Orla Charlton, Frank McCusker and Stanley Townsend. 

Musicians Alex Bonney, trumpet / electronics; Nick Roth, saxophones / objects; Alexander Hawkins, piano; Neil Charles, double bass; Simon Roth, drums.

In 2015 the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival commissioned a new setting of The Waste Land created with the permission of the T.S. Eliot Estate. The work was directed by Adrian Dunbar for four actors, with score for improvising quintet by Nick Roth.

Ted Hughes declaimed of the poem: “We are often told that coming when it did, in 1922, out of the shock and exhaustion immediately following the First World War, this poem stands between the old world and the new; that it recapitulates the decay and collapse of the inner life of the old world, and at the same time divines – and defines – the spiritual condition which became the cornerstone of the new.”

This event marks 100 years since the poem, published in December 1922, heralded the birth of modernist English literature.

Tickets

Tickets available via the Hay Festival, booking here.