1939 Germany invades Poland: World War 2 begins: but in Toronto University, Canada, the professor of English, G. Wilson Knight, was writing a book: The Burning Oracle. I came across this book around 1984 when Max Hafler and I decided to form a small-scale touring theatre company. We wanted to show how Shakespeare and the Jacobean Dramatists worked not with complex scenery and high tech revolves and atmospheric lighting but with language itself: albeit, as Wordsworth defined it: the emotional heightened language of poetry.

Wilson Knight’s key phrase when discussing this was “the image is the action”…. more simply and with a psychological spin: what you imagine your physical body will try to do. Max has written about all this on his blog, https://maxhafler.wordpress.com . He is shortly going to show how this all can work in an exciting and wonderful way in his production of “The Heart Ward” at The O’Donoghue Centre Theatre, University of Galway, May 8^th. At 8 p.m. and May 9th. At 2 p.m. (with a talk back at 3 p.m.) and again 8 p.m.