Author(s): Tim Supple

Plays, Theatre & Dance

A new dramatization for the stage of Ted Hughes's highly acclaimed translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses When it was published in 1997, "Tales from Ovid" was immediately recognized as the best rendering of Ovid in generations, a classic in its own right and a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. For Hughes, one of the most admired and widely read poets of our day, had translated twenty-four of Ovid's stories--legends connected by their transformational motifs--with the elegance and passion that distinguished his own poems. His vigorous, fluid poetry is drama itself and demands to be spoken aloud. Tim Supple and Simon Reade take ten of the tales --including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, of Venus and Adonis, of Pyramus and Thisbe, among others--and transform them into elegant works for the stage. Erotic, violent, and magical, this dramatization of "Tales from Ovid" realizes the immense power of Hughes's original text, which Michael Hofmann celebrated in The Times (London) as "one of the great works of the century."