AN EARL'S COURT MISCELLANY Announced as Part of #FinboroughFrontier

The Finborough Theatre's new digital initiative #FinboroughFrontier begins with a celebration of the vivid history and personalities of Earl's Court featuring poetry, prose and music.

Filmed in and around the local area, An Earl's Court Miscellany will be available to watch FREE-TO-VIEW on the Finborough Theatre YouTube channel from Friday, 28 January 2022 at 6:00pm to Friday, 25 February 2022 at midnight, and showing concurrently with subtitles on Scenesaver.

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Walk with us in verse and song, guided by your future Landlady, and take in the spirit of Earl's Court. Encounter its revolutionaries, poets, musicians and dancers. Its wartime and sporting heroes, inventors and romancers. Get to know your neighbours and their fetishes. And when day falls into night, witness our humanity - and the ghosts that haunt the place.

From the music hall to the coffee house, past and present collide as Rhyme & Reason trace the echoes left by those who lived, died or were buried in the Earl's Court area. Those featured include children's writers Mary Louisa Molesworth, and Beatrix Potter who was inspired by her walks in Brompton Cemetery to create some of her best-loved characters; Sir Henry Cole, founder of the V&A and Prince Albert's right hand man in the creation of the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace; James Bohee, a Canadian banjo player of Caribbean descent who introduced Victorian audiences to black American music and tutored the future King Edward VII; John Wisden, the founder of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack; music hall singer Charles Coborn; universal suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst; and poets Ivor Gurney, Jean Ingelow, who came close to becoming our first female Poet Laureate in 1896, and Henry Austin Dobson (commemorating the centenary of his death in 1922) - whose good friend Lewis Carroll often came round to visit...

Actor, writer and director Catherine Harvey is Artistic Director of Rhyme & Reason. Catherine directs and curates Rhyme & Reason's shows, drawing on the work of both popular and less well-known poets, as well as music and song. As an actor, she has worked in venues including the Finborough Theatre, the Bush Theatre, Arcola Theatre, the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, and Clwyd Theatr Cymru. As a playwright, she has had work performed at venues including Bolton Octagon Theatre, the Bush Theatre, Arcola Theatre, Soho Theatre, the Old Red Lion Theatre, Theatre503, Morden Hall Park, the 24:7 Theatre Festival, Manchester, and Pleasance Edinburgh. As a director, she has worked on new writing at the Bush Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, Soho Theatre, The Cockpit, 24:7 Theatre Festival, Manchester, and Pleasance Edinburgh, as well as working with comedians who have performed at the Camden, Brighton, Melbourne and Edinburgh Festivals, and on national and international tours - including stand-ups Mary Bourke (Best of Irish, Time Out Critics Choice), Sajeela Kershi (Asian Woman of the Year - Arts and Media, The Times Top 6 Female Acts), Funny Women winner Suzy Bennett (Time Out Top 10 Acts to Watch) and Louise Mai Newberry aka 'Precious Jade' (WOW at South Bank Centre and Yellow Earth's Dim Sum Nights). Catherine is also series producer of Radio 4's long-running poetry series Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets (produced by Made in Manchester), which has travelled as far afield as Aberdeenshire, Northern Ireland, South Wales and the Forest of Dean, seeking out wonderful poetry written in local dialect. Tongue and Talk has frequently featured on Radio 4's Pick of the Week and been chosen as pick of the day in a range of newspapers - including The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Mail - and even mentioned in the Manx Parliament, Tynwald.

The poetry performance group Rhyme & Reason was co-founded by actors and poetry enthusiasts Catherine Harvey, Jonathan Cullen and Peter Kenny under the mentorship of the late Clive Swift to create bespoke live poetry events. The group's rolling membership includes actors who have worked in the West End, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre, as well as contributing to Arts programmes on Radio 3, 4 and the World Service. Catherine Harvey is the current Artistic Director, devising and directing their frequently sold-out shows, which the group have performed at venues as diverse as Dr Johnson's House, the Poetry Café, St Mary's Church, Bow, and the Tristan Bates Theatre. When Covid hit, Rhyme & Reason took their work online, with Zoom performances that have been watched as far afield as Newfoundland, Japan and the Isle of Man.

During lockdown, the acclaimed #FinboroughForFree series released monthly free-to-view archive recordings and original online content including new plays, rediscoveries, a community festival, and the Finborough Forum, our invitation-only group for theatre creatives. The online work saw us awarded London Pub Theatres' Award for Pub Theatre of the Year 2020, and our web series Late Night Staring At High Res Pixels won London Pub Theatres Standing Ovation Award for Best Online Theatre 2021.

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