Bryony Lavery

My theme is memory, that winged host? that soared about me one grey morning of wartime. Billeted to Brideshead during the Second World War, Captain Charles Ryder is overwhelmed by memories of his Oxford days and holidays spent in the fine stately home under the privileged spell of the dazzling Marchmains. As past and present blur, Charles recalls his enchantment with the beguiling Sebastian, his beautiful sister Julia and the doomed Catholic family, and considers how they would change his life for ever. Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, reimagined for the stage by Bryony Lavery, was co-produced by English Touring Theatre and York Theatre Royal. The show premiered at York Theatre Royal in April 2016 and then toured the UK.

Brideshead Revisited

Draculelle

Helen 

He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

Here I am, I thought, back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power power has no dignity. 

"I never see you now," she said. "I never seem to see anyone I like. I don't know why."

 But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been irm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when timne is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I who were never friends betore, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy. 

"Sometimes." said Julia, "I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”

Perhans, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smokea thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace-perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, cach straining through and beyond the other, Snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us. 

Essence

…to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Lukas

These memories, which are my life - for we posses nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. 

I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all. 

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