THE GUARDIANS

by Chris Walshaw - with Laura Cameron, Anne Chamberlain, Shaun Lawton, and Peter Gilbert Cotton.

Who should T.S. Eliot, the Nobel Prize winning poet, appoint as guardian of his works? His old and faithful friends, or a young woman who would be sure to protect his legacy many years after his death?

This new play by Chris Walshaw explores two unknown love stories in the life of the great 20th century poet.
Little is known about the personal life of Tom Eliot, other than the turmoil of his first marriage depicted in the play and movie Tom and Viv (Michael Hastings, 1984). The Guardians is an intuitive interpretation of his later life, beginning with the death of Viv in a mental hospital in 1947, of his emotions, his personal circumstances, and his close friends; culminating in his second marriage in 1957.

Chris Walshaw, from New Zealand, has been writing, and producing theatre at ETB since 2002 (Need, Balkonstr 5, Jam Sandwich), was Curator of the LAB in 2006, has read some of his poems and stories in various venues in Berlin, and has devised and presented variously the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.