A Literary Drama With Music

Originally commissioned by the Shaker Height Arts Council. 

Bloomsbury and the Great War is an original one-act play written by WordStage Artistic Director, Tim Tavcar, that takes us to Garsington, the ‘country cottage” of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell. It is 1914 and Word War I has begun in earnest. Lady Ottoline and her liberal Parliamentarian husband discuss the ramifications for them and their artistic and literary pacifist friends with Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Leonard and Virginia are in the process of launching their Hogarth Press which would go on to publish many of the leading pacifist writers of the day, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Robert Graves and, of course, the “Woolves” themselves.. The script is full of reflections on the War, amusing anecdotes about the characters onstage as well as some of their fellow “Bloomsberries.”  The text will be heightened and illustrated by music of British composers of the era – including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Edward Elgar.