Losing Venice

A haunting tale of love, loss, and the passage of time.

For audiences drawn to poignant, beautifully crafted drama.

About the Ebook

'Our duty is plain. To bring an end to peace.'

An empire gone wrong; an empire completely gone, in fact. A nation with delusional ideas of its place in the world, making poor choices, involved in clumsy foreign adventures, constantly on the edge of war.

At home, class divides are stark yet all attention is on a Duke's ceremonial marriage. And surging through the chaos, the absurdities of masculinity threaten to destroy everything.

An epic fable set in the faraway Spanish Golden Age, Jo Clifford's play Losing Venice is a joyously original, witty take-down of dangerously daft machismo and the deranged behaviour of countries that have lost an empire and still not yet found a role…

First seen at the 1985 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Losing Venice was revived at the Orange Tree, Richmond, in 2018.

Reviews

'Delightfully bonkers, idiosyncratic and totally eccentric' Broadway World

'Chock-full of ideas – some of them brilliantly disturbing... sit back, relax and enjoy the myriad of riddles, the flights of lexical and philosophical fancy and the grotesquely beautiful absurdities' LondonTheatre1

'Truly outstanding' New Statesman

Why You'll Love This Ebook

• Lyrical exploration of love and inevitable loss.
• Stunning theatrical poetry about human connection.
• Published by Nick Hern Books, leading contemporary theatre publisher.
• A tender meditation on impermanence.

About the Author

Jo Clifford (formerly known as John Clifford) is an award-winning playwright, translator, poet and performer, who has also worked as a journalist and academic. She was instrumental in establishing the reputation of the Traverse Theatre Company in the 1980s.

She is the author of about eighty plays, many of which have been performed all over the world. They include: Losing Venice, Every One, Faust and The Tree of Knowledge. Her adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations makes her the first openly transgendered woman playwright to have had a play on in London’s West End.

Publication Details

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

Publication Date: 01 January 1970

Print Length: 72 pages (Ebook edition)

ISBN (Ebook): 9781788500913

Format: Ebook

Language: English

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