Client: Phrased & Confused
Horny Handed Tons of Soil is a co-production between Phrased & Confused and Unity Theatre
‘A modern day Under Milk Wood’ (Chris McCabe)
‘it steals and quietly breaks your heart’ (Liverpool Sound and Vision)
Project weblink: www.phrasedandconfused.co.uk
Inspired by the maverick work of Adrian Henri, Horny Handed Tons of Soil, fuses beat poetry with folk song, electronic composition with live brass and percussion and documentary film with theatrical story telling. It’s a truly mesmeric show, beautiful in so many ways
Heres the blurb:
‘The city is alive. Wandering the streets, the Child, the Poet and Death trace memories and map dreams onto a landscape shifting under the spell of time’
You can read more about the show, Adrian Henri here and about Lizzie Nunnery’s process in developing the show here http://phrasedandconfused.co.uk/about-the-show/
Key dates: 7 June – York Theatre Royal
Web Links: http://www.nunnerynorheim.com/
Back in 2016 Phrased & Confused together with the Unity Theatre commissioned Liverpool based poet, folk singer and playwright Lizzie Nunnery to create a new spoken word piece to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Mersey Sound by Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri.
Lizzie has always found herself drawn to the work of Adrian – a poet, painter and performer – a polymath who like many of the artists both Unity and Phrased & Confused work with, crossed boundaries and genres with ease. So it was Adrian’s work, his ‘happenings’ and his wanderings (early experiments in mytho-geography) that first inspired this brand new work. And specifically one of Adrian’s fragment poems, found in The Mersey Sound:
‘Liverpool I love your horny-handed tons of soil.’
Lizzie and her collaborators Vidar Norheim, Martin Heslop and Martin Smith presented a first extract of the piece at Liverpool Philharmonic’s Music Room in March 16 as part of the Liverpool Acoustic Festival. Get Into This called it ‘ a swelling rollercoaster of a piece, a love story of Liverpool life from the wasted artists of Gambier Terrace to the Toxteth Riots and beyond’.
For the 50th anniversary of The Mersey Sound the Unity, supported by P&C, then produced the first full version of Lizzie’s Horny Handed Tons of Soil to significant critical acclaim in July 17. A smaller acoustic version of the show went onto play St Helens libraries and the Southbank Centre, London.
And since March 2018 P&C have been taking the show out on the road, with the final tour date being in the glorious surroundings of York Theatre Royal…