‘Unsung Heroine’ – The Telling

St Paul’s Worthing

Sunday 13 October

5.45pm doors/cafe , start at 6.15pm

If you missed this early music concert-drama from writer/singer Clare Norburn at the Hastings Literary Festival in the late summer – maybe your nose was deep in a recommended book! – all is not lost and gone if Worthing is on your travel radar.

This Arts Council-backed Medieval bio-fantasy has a handy start time if your journey’s a bit lengthy. It will end around 8pm and contain a short Q&A.

To find a female troubadour writing and singing songs as far as you can back in history, the first lone work of lyric and music on surviving manuscript is ‘A Chantar’, by Provençal countess, Beatriz de Dia. The song is apparently from a true heart and is reaction to betrayal, longing and a pain requiring suppression amid aristocratic court life of love, intrigue and back-stabbing.

Norburn seizes on this as another historical figure ripe for her instinctive treatment in blending fact with fiction, blurring concert into theatre, and creating another entertaining, informative and immersive experience for The Telling’s fascinated and growing audience.

‘Unsung Heroine’s’ distinctive soundtrack of Medieval harp, fiddle and bagpipes with percussion, in the hands of instrumental specialists Joy Smith and Giles Lewin, explores and juxtaposes plaintive ballads with the rumbustious dances of court life and codpiece fun beyond its walls.

The villain of the piece, in times when unhappy spouses conventionally allowed each other their dalliances, is (“Did you guess, Mr Cadfael?”) a fellow troubadour.

Norburn’s dramatic imagination places actress Anna Demetrious in the role of Beatriz de Dia while Norburn herself sings as not only various key characters but of both a confidante to the countess and a voice inside her head. Shades of the fine psychological plays by David Pountney dramatised on BBC Radio 3.

Production is by Norburn, direction by TV series and movies man Nicholas Renton, and lighting design is by Natalie Rowland.

Ticket details and further concert information – plus a trail video from its performance at Music in Oxford: https://www.facebook.com/events/386913162009827/

“Gorgeous music . . . and the story’s human, truthful and a bit funny . . .” – Read here the interview with actress Anna Demetriou who is Beatriz de Dia: https://www.thetelling.co.uk/post/interview-anna-demitriou-on-playing-beatriz