The Ostraka Plays: Volume One - Unearth

By Francis Hagan

This is the first play in a series entitled the Ostraka Plays which delve into the grotesque; the mysterious; and the bizarre. In Unearth, an unknown alien planet is visited by a small archaeological team tasked to uncover its fate. The litter of a once vast civilisation lies everywhere while above them all hangs a solitary sun destined never to move - the consequence of a cosmic cataclysm which doomed the planet. As the team delves deep into the mystery, one of its members is found murdered in a tunnel and so Special Operative Unwith is dispatched to attempt to solve the murder. Not everything is what it seems, however, and Unwith finds himself in an investigation like nothing he has ever encountered before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Hagan
• Release date: Jan 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466098299

Francis Hagan

I have been writing on and off since I was a shy lad hiding under the bed and scribbling in an out of date diary (I think it was about my space travels). Most of my works have been either plays populated with grotesques who stumble around ruins and those odd places we forget about or epic tales of those last Roman legionaries as they falter and fall at the end of Empire. Over the last three years, I have embarked on a series of plays which I have entitled 'The Ostraka Plays' and in which I am exploring that space where the irrational and the seductive collide. I remain fascinated by a poetics which allows an imagination to populate a forgotten nook in history outside our conventions and expectations. In these plays, the audience is invited into worlds which remain provisional and insecure - and where freedom is that release from convention. The other side of my writings could not be more opposite - in these stories, the dying light of Rome flutters one last desperate time as I seek to follow the last of the Eagles down into their fates. Here, archaeological record, literary fragments, and my own invention intertwine to set a stage ripe for heroics and betrayal.

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THE OSTRAKA PLAYS, VOLUME ONE

UNEARTH

By

FRANCIS HAGAN

Published by Francis Hagan at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Francis Hagan

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THE OSTRAKA PLAYS

Volume One

By

Francis Hagan

It is fairly obvious I have spent too much time in an Eastern European theatre world – there are no surprises for guessing that! Throughout a key period, I was either reading and studying Polish and Romanian theatre or spending time there immersing myself in the theatres of Kantor and Grotowski; Serban and Purcarete; the plays of Witkacy, Sorescu, Grombowicz, Mrozek, and others, or just wandering around old theatre spaces and seeing old posters on the dressing room or barroom walls. That world, that legacy, of a martyred theatre, a wracked body, cast out by the State, is indelibly printed in me now. So it is no surprise also that the plays I am drawn to here back in Britain and the dramas I find stumbling off my pen are also in some ways echoes and reflections of a theatre aesthetic rooted in a broader European view – a view which is never anchored in the domestic, the familiar, the naive. These theatre worlds are half way between the surreal imaginations of a child hiding under a bed in the dark and the light of a prison cell in all its chromatic  nakedness. It is a theatre world not afraid of a deep intellectual examination, a rigour, if you will, of a world which perhaps only ever occupies the space of a single mind – the author’s mind. There is a fierceness in these writings and stagings which demands an equal commitment from an audience who are there to witness almost as a