Welcome to a world where money matters. Where the gap between rich and poor has grown to a chasm. Where the moral certainties of the past are slipping away and the threat of apocalypse is never far from your mind. But this is not 2017. It is the world conjured by the 14h century poet William Langland in his surreal, hypnotic masterwork Piers Plowman.

Written almost 650 years ago, Piers Plowman enters the mind of a wanderer, Will, as he falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, dreams of a “fair field full of folk” and embarks on a quest to find Truth. This summer, a new site-specific theatrical production, Fair Field, reimagines this 7,000-line “poem of crisis” for the 21st century.

In the first of three original podcasts produced for the Guardian, Langland’s hallucinatory dreamscape is conjured through voices, texts and sounds that bring the modern and medieval together, revealing a society of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis that is uncannily like our own.

Podcasts produced by Natalie Steed for Penned in the Margins

The Guardian Books Podcast

Piers Plowman's Dreamworld

The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus.

Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.

Winner of the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer Award
Winner of the Ted Hughes Award
Winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award
Shortlisted for the Griffin Prize
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize
Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize
Poetry Book of the Year - The Guardian
Poetry Book of the Year - The Sunday Times
Book of the Year - The Poetry School

End Credits

Happy Birthday Moon

Dementia

His Heart

Miami Airport

Thinking Of Dad's Dick

Samantha

Maybe I Could Love A Man

After Being Called A Fucking Foreigner

I Want The Confidence Of

To Sweeten Bitter

Two Guns In The Sky For Daniel Harris

The Shame Of Mable Gardiner Hubbards

Doctor Marigold Reevaluated

The Mechanisms Of Speech

Conversation With The Art Teacher

For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent

After Reading Deaf School

Dear Hearing World

Sound Machine

I  Move Through London Like A Hotep

The Perseverance

Ode To My Hair

Jamaican British

My Mother Remembers

Aunt Beryl Meets Castro

Echo

Introduction

Title

Enter the psychedelic dreamscape of Piers Plowman to explore a world of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis uncannily like our own.

Fair Field (summer 2017) re-imagined the medieval ‘poem of crisis’ Piers Plowman for the twenty-first century through site-responsive performances in London, Ledbury and the Malvern Hills, an exhibition at the National Poetry Library, educational workshops, a series of podcasts with The Guardian and more.

Reason FM - The Confession of the Sins

Reason FM - The Marriage of Lady Mede

Reason FM - Will's Dream

Professor Lawrence Warner reads from Piers Plowman 'In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne'

Professor Lawrence Warner reads from Piers Plowman 'Thus yrobed in russet I romed aboute'

Commissioned for Fair Field & performed as part of The Confession of the Sins

Written by Francesca Millican-Slater
Performed by Francesca Millican-Slater, Michael Wagg & the cast
Sound design & production by Jon McLeod

Wrath by Francesca Millican-Slater

Front Row

Fair Field on BBC Front Row

The Perseverance audiobook is available from Audible, Amazon and iTunes

Ode to My Hair by Raymond Antrobus

Diary 3: Richard Skelton and Emily Oldfield

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