The Ostraka Plays: Volume Two - ITHAKA

By Francis Hagan

A nameless crossroads in a forgotten European country and an Old Woman toils endlessly in the dirt. When a scarred Veteran drifts aimlessly down the crossroads, old wounds and bitter losses are opened - and a deeper truth emerges. This short play was staged as part of The National Theatre of Scotland's 5-Minute Theatre Festival in June 2011 and premiered at the Glasgow Theatre Arts Collective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Hagan
• Release date: Jan 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465880536

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I have been writing on and off since I was a shy lad hiding under the bed and scribbling in an out of date diary (I think it was about my space travels).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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