Dr Patricia Fara Historian of science at Cambridge University Emeritus Fellow of Clare college talks on her book ‘An entertainment for angels, electricity in the Enlightenment’
Sue Bevan Writer, Theatre maker and Workshop leader and winner of the Alpine Fellowship international Theatre Prize 2020 and the Yoevil Literary prize in 2021 for her play ‘Hiraeth’ about the Aberfan disaster of 1966 which she witnessed as a young first aider.
Through poetry, narrative storytelling, original documentation and theatrical dialectic Hiraeth explores questions thrown up by the Aberfan tragedy and persisting to this very day.
Present and past collide in a Welsh nomansland. When a tip five times the recommended height pours onto the local junior school and claims 116 children’s lives, fundamental failings of late modern capitalism are laid bare, issues that will arise again at Flixborough, Hillsborough, and Grenfell. Some lives really don’t matter and, when it’s a question of profit versus people, the ordinary man, woman and child rarely come out on top.
So when is it time to let go of the rage at past wrongdoings? Fifty years on? A hundred? Or does a man-made, predictable and above all a predicted tragedy like this so change the DNA of the individual, the community, and the body politic, that it’s never possible to heal or restore a sense of equilibrium. Should we strive to ‘forgive and forget’, or must we instead ‘forgive and remember’? Are we compelled to carry our pain forever, each day dying another death until our last breath? Or can we somehow own our agency, employ it, and start to live once more?
Olenka Dmtryk
Fighting has meant 25 works by Maryia Pyrichenko have been destroyed and the society is protesting in Kings Parade.
Pryimachenko’s work was admired by Picasso
