The Wye Plays

A first volume of plays by a startlingly ambitious and inventive dramatist. The Back of Beyond takes, as its starting point, the route of a sequel toKing Lear, in which the surviving Shakespearean characters set out on an odyssey through a perilous, blasted landscape, and encounter new agents of cruelty, desire and magic. Wildly humorous and fiercely shocking, the play charts a series of remorseless exposures, interrogating the idealisms and brutal repressions that have informed Anglo-Welsh relations whilst subverting Shakespearean motifs; tragically humorous poetic language and nightmarish visual imagery contribute to the sense of a land where the signposts have been smashed. A sequel toThe Back of Beyond, The Battle of the Crows extends and concludes the stories of three characters - a maverick witch, a renegade knight, and an abuse victim made empress - in a harrowing and humorous exploration of border warfare, witchcraft, massacre, bitchery, hilarity and heartbreak.The Battle of the Crowsis partly a dramatic speculation about desire as magic, partly a sad reckless laugh at internecine hostilities and the passionate and disastrous transformations which spring up in the face of Death itself.

David Ian Rabey is Professor of Drama and Subject Leader of Theatre Studies at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth.