Sea and Land and Sky

(Paperback)

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Description

Set in 1916, three young women from the Scottish Women's Hospital are sent to the Russian front to support the war effort. Ailsa is working class and determined to make an impression on her superiors, Millicent is a self-confessed hedonist and Lily is searching for her lost husband. Unprepared for what they witness, each must find a way of coping as they fight to survive an experience that will change them forever.

Poetic, visionary and startlingly written, Abigail Docherty's historical play is based on actual diaries of young Scottish nurses who experienced the Great War. Often darkly funny and raw in its emotions, Sea and Land and Sky is a gripping and sensual tale of youth, war, memory - and the power of love.

Sea and Land and Sky is boldly inventive, blackly comic, and starkly savage.

Reviews

'Abigail Docherty, remember the name. Her new play Sea And Land And Sky - which is inspired by the real diaries of women who served in the Scottish Women's Hospital expeditions in the First World War - is surely one of the best new plays to emerge in Scottish theatre in the last decade. Powerful, poetic and resonatingly tragic, it is a soul-shuddering example of the kind of profound and ambitious writing which is all too rare in new British theatre.' * Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 17.10.10 *
'it captures something of the carnage of Sarah Kane's Blasted and the desolation of Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children. Its strength is in the strange, allucinatory air that undercuts the period realism' * Mark Fisher, Guardian, 15.10.10 *
'Abigail Docherty's Sea And Land And Sky, winner of this year's Open Stage new play competition at the Tron Theatre, is an ambitious poetic drama' * Joyce McMillan, Scotsman, 15.10.10 *

Author Bio

Abigail Docherty was was a Scriptwriting Fellow for the Scottish Arts Council from 2003 to 2004 and a visiting writer at the International School of Audio-Visual Creation in Paris in 2003. Her plays include Room (Mayfesto Festival, Tron Theatre), 1000 Paper Cranes (Imaginate International Children's Festival, Goblin Market (Southwark Playhouse) and The Waves (Tristan Bates Theatre).