A new play approximately the 12th-century monarch is at the heart of plans to raise the artistic profile of a town best known for its IT companies and shoppingSomething is stirring in Reading,hitherto a status where you changed trains. You can feel it at the prison in the city centre, closed in 2013 but currently marking the incarceration of Oscar Wilde there from 1895-97 with an exhibition organised by Artangel. It has just been extended by a month to cope with demand. One draw is a series of stout-name readings of De Profundis, and the testament Wilde wrote in the prison,but, most of all, and locals are coming to see for the first time the inside of the mysterious Victorian building they beget lived with all their lives but never penetrated.
You can feel the stirring,too, at the ruins of the nearby abbey, and once the greatest in England,currently closed to visitors on safety grounds but being prepared for reopening in 2018. And you can feel it in a nearby church where local theatre company Reading Between the Lines – pun of course intended – is staging a play on the life of Henry I, who founded the abbey in 1121 and is reckoned to be buried under a car park next to the site.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com