The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation Presents The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour: Oscar Wilde

Following the success of the WB Yeats and WH Auden Poetry Hours, The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation is delighted to return to the Abbey Stage to celebrate the genius of Wilde.

This sold-out event will be a rare opportunity to hear author Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's only grandson, speak about his grandfather and read Josephine Hart's introduction to Wilde's universally acclaimed and moving masterpiece The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Celebrated actor Simon Callow (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, A Room with a View) will read the ballad.

"My grandfather believed firmly in the music of words, irrespective whether in poetry or in prose, and the vital importance of literature appealing to the ear not just the eye, so it's wonderfully appropriate that we should celebrate the life of Josephine Hart through an hour of Oscar's poetry here in Dublin where words are so much the life-blood of the city."
MERLIN HOLLAND

"Bringing Oscar Wilde back to Ireland always seems right. And to be performing his poetry, especially his last work, ripped out of his bowels after two years' incarceration in an English jail, seems particularly apt. He never thought of himself as anything other than a poet. And Josephine Hart, that blazing beacon of a woman, Mullingar's favourite daughter, never wavered about the importance of the everyday experience of poetry. So where better to speak Wilde's words than fifteen minutes away from his birthplace, in the theatre founded by a poet, with the Josephine Hart Foundation."
SIMON CALLOW

All profits from the evening are being donated to the Abbey Theatre Development Fund and the King George V Fund for Actors and Actresses in need.

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