Broken Shells at Wolverhampton Literature Festival

BROKEN SHELLS: A MEDIEVAL SEA STORY

Bantock House Museum, Wolverhampton

Sat 27th January – 1.30pm

60mins

£8 / £6 concessions – Available online from here, tel 0870 320 7000 or in person from Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

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In a little room in Rome, a bride sits at her window.  The deep windowsill is covered with litter – a scrap of dried seaweed, the jagged edge of a pink scallop, scattered grains of sand. Her eyes are fixed on the ocean outside.

She has always loved the sea.

But now the day has come.  Yesterday, she wept.  She wept to be sent away from friends who care for her, sent to be a foreigner in strange land and bound to a man she doesn’t know.

She wept because, of course, everyone knows that all husbands are good.

And the waves rush up, and the stars rotate, and the waves pull back again.

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Storyteller and academic Daisy Black brings to life Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale – a tale of love, fear, passion, violence and the queer, cold seas which roil and coil between nations.

Custance, who has beauty without pride, youth without foolishness and strength without tyranny, finds herself cast adrift at sea.  Forced to endure hostile lands and people, and carve paths for herself among strange cultures, the strongest of Chaucer’s heroines strings her strength across the oceans, telling us what it is to love and to survive.

Set among the eddies and currents of medieval romance, classical mythology and English folk song, this one-woman show tells a haunting, visceral, occasionally funny tale that will whirl round your senses, lace your tongue with salt and take you across the sapphire-worked seas to walk with the creatures at the far edges of the map.

The story is told in the Edwardian drawing room of Bantock House.  The performance is one hour long and is suitable for ages 13 and up.