When writer messed about on the river
COOKHAM DEAN: A play exploring the life of Kenneth Grahame, the author of
The Wind in the Willows, is coming to the village where he once lived.
Lost in the Willows, by FourTails Theatre Company, will be performed in Cookham Dean Village Hall, Church Road on Saturday, November 26.
The play explores the life of the beloved author, who claimed he only enjoyed one brief period of his life: his carefree childhood on the banks of the Thames.
Grahame spent several years in early childhood at The Mount, Cookham Dean, having been sent there as a small boy to live with his grandmother following the death of his mother.
His uncle was curate at Cookham Dean Church.
A soul-destroying job, an assassination attempt, a disastrous rollercoaster of a marriage and a stubborn refusal to grow up all led to Grahame crafting The Wind in the Willows.
The Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows is based on Quarry Wood above Cookham Dean.
Toad Hall may be based on Cliveden House, visible
from the riverbank beyond Cookham Lock.
Grahame later returned to The Mount, Cookham Dean as an adult, living there again from 1906 to 1908. It was during this two-year span that The Wind in the Willows was edited and published.
Lost in the Willows is an examination of the life and relationships of the children's author.
Playwright Christine Foster, said: “When I read a biography of Kenneth Grahame, I was amazed at the painful contrast between this imagined idyllic existence and the
disjointed, dispirited life of loss and loneliness that he actually led.
“It seemed to me that this tragic irony was inherently dramatic and also somehow inevitable. In the play I want to celebrate a gloriously gifted writer whose stubborn love affair with jolly fellowship and rural tranquillity created an extraordinary literary gift to the world, while, at the same time, explore how it came to destroy his own family by robbing them of the gift of himself.”
To book tickets visit ticketsource.co.uk/ lostinthewillows