A Mere Interlude: a Cornish Melodrama

a play by Alan M. Kent
based on a short story by Thomas Hardy

Paperback 134 pages with 11 black and white photographs
ISBN 978 1 903427 56 9

’... contains several excellent scenes and highly imaginative bits of business from wedding to honeymoon, funeral to boat and train journeys, and is often very funny’

The Cornishman, June 2010

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’... as good as it gets... peppered with romance, sex, violence and a huge amount of fun’

Sheila Vanloo in St Austell Voice, May 2010

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The play

Alan M Kent’s new play, A Mere Interlude, is adapted from the short story by Thomas Hardy. Set in Cornwall and on the Isles of Scilly in the last years of the nineteenth century, it tells the tale of Baptista Trewethen, a school teacher with ‘modern’ ideas, betrothed to Davy Heddegan, an older and prosperous friend of the family. But when her old sweetheart, Charles Stow, appears on the scene, the story takes an unexpected turn. A moment of madness, Baptista’s ‘interlude’ leads her into uncharted waters.
By the acclaimed author of The Tin Violin and Surfing Tommies, this drama mixes passion and comedy with Kent’­s usual zest.

The author

Alan M. Kent was born in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1967. He is a prize-winning poet, novelist and dramatist and author and editor of a number of works on Cornish and Anglo-Cornish literature, including Looking at the Mermaid, a Reader in Cornish Literature 900–1900, two anthologies of Anglo-Cornish poetry, Voices from West Barbary and The Dreamt Sea, and an acclaimed translation of the Cornish Mystery play cycle, The Ordinalia. Two of his other plays are published by Francis Boutle Publishers: Oogly es Sin and The Tin Violin.