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| The cast of The world's Wife |
SATIRICAL poems by Carol Ann Duffy make up one part of the Company of Ten's mini-season which gets underway next week.
The World's Wife is based on the lives of little-known women of well-known men and the poems vary from extremely funny to powerful and dark.
Carol Ann Duffy is a much-respected poet whose most recent achievement in January was winning the T.S. Eliot Poetry Award for her latest collection Rapture, a set of love poems.
She combines acerbic wit with warmth and humanity and has an original slant on common experiences.
The critic Sean O'Brien dubs her "the representative poet of her day" because her poems are accessible and entertaining.
The World's Wife recreates episodes from history and mythology from the wife's perspective. It marks a new development in her work in that it expresses hope and emotional confidence while dealing with strong and raw emotions.
She takes wives such as Mrs Pilate, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Faust, Frau Freud, Mrs Quasimodo, women usually defined by their men such as Delilah, Anne Hathaway and Eurydice and re-tellings of old stories in which the lead changes sex - Queen Kong, the Kray Sisters and Elvis' twin sister, the nun.
Regarded as her most overtly-feminist work, she described the poems as "looking for the missing truth rather than accepting the way we've been taught".
She added: "If you look at King Kong, which is one of my favourite movies, it's not necessarily the way a woman would go about things. I thought if a woman gorilla had fallen in love with a man, she'd have been much more subtle about it."
The World's Wife can be seen with Bash by Neil LaBute and a second chance to see some of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads during the mini-season which runs from Wednesday, April 19, until May 6. Further details about performances and tickets can be obtained from the Abbey Theatre on 01727 857861.
© Herts Advertiser 2006. Reproduced by permission