Riveting play on the dramatic, courageous, moving life of Sylvia Plath to show her impact on feminism, postmodernism and understanding of mental illness.
Sylvia Plath's fascinating and enigmatic life mirrors her icon, Emily Bronte. This play follows Sivvy's courageous and inspiring journey. Sivvy's first poem published in 1940 at eight, seems to guarantee a golden literary future, till tragically months later, her father dies, plunging her into poverty. Sivvy struggles to survive working tirelessly to keep scholarships to study, and bravely batting rejection after rejection to gain a few successes in the heartless world of popular publishing. At twenty Sivvy comes home exhausted and disillusioned from a month's cadetship in the false world of New York magazines, hiding her devastation and shame from a rape. Her well-meaning, unknowing mother wants to make her into a glamorous secretary, and the Harvard Summer School rejects her application for their writing course. Overwhelmed with sadness she seeks suicide., surviving miraculously, and courageously recovering from her mental breakdown, unaware this cataclysmic time will shape her poetry. Winning a Fullbright Scholarship to Cambridge University her hopes revive, when poetry and articles are published, and she marries poet Ted Hughes with dreams of a golden partnership in writing poetry together. But within the year Sivvy is working full time to support him. so he can write, but she, too exhausted to do so! With her daughter's birth, 1950-60s patriarchal society's domestication of women hits down hard on her. Now her only real link with writing is typing and editing Ted's poems. Her identity lost in becoming Mrs Ted Hughes, like most creative wives this is where their journey ends. But not Sivvy's! Lady Lazarus has a history of rising from the dead. Come see, how an icon of feminism and champion of breaking the silence and shame around mental illness, is born.
