Past event
Join the waiting list and be the first to find out if tickets become available.
An evening of poems, drawings, stories and possibly dancing. Included in the spectacle are a pair of Dromedaries, alongside a number of newly composed pieces touching on John Keats’s letters.
The titular Dromedaries emerge in the activities of Monsieur Robinet alongside the Frenchman’s faithful canine companion, Chirac. Other dogs include that of 19th Century American geologist Florence Bascomb; as well as D. H. Lawrence’s tortoise, puffins, a ladybird, a frog and half a dragon.
The show contains rhymes, stories and possibly dancing, and a number of newly composed pieces touching on John Keats’s letters and leisure activities. The singing camel (not to be confused with a dromedary). which Keats imagined in a letter to Jane and Mariane Renolds makes an appearance, although which song it sings is yet to be decided.
‘An exquisitely curated package that is unmistakably Hegley’ Chortle
The show is designed in the main for adults, but may be of interest to the odd nine-year-old.
John Hegley was born in Newington Green, Islington, North London. and now lives in the neighbouring borough of Hackney. He led two John Peel sessions with his band The Popticians on Radio1 in 1983/4, hosted the Border TV poetry series, Word of Mouth in 1989 and was a Perrier Comedy Award nominee in the same year. There have been three series of Hearing with Hegley on BBC Radio 4 – 1996-2000 and Hegley was the BBC Online poet in residence 1999. In 2010 – he worked with Company Paradiso in Warning, May Contain Nuts alongside BBC Radios Sussex and Berkshire, challenging stigmas around mental illness.
Hegley was Keats House poet in residence in 2012, and in 2019, Arts Council England funded his touring collaborative project Putting You in the Picture; working with fellow poets to take children to art galleries to delve into, and respond to art works with drawing, writing and cut-out paper characters. Currently he is working on a story about a travelling Frenchman, to be performed with a brass octet.