HUGHES, Ted. Sacred Earth Dramas. London: Faber and Faber. 1993.
8vo. Illustrated yellow, blue and red paper wrappers with blue lettering to white spine; pp. xii, 179; minimal, natural toning to pages otherwise near fine.
First edition, including an inscription addressing Hughes' close friend Nick Grant, "Nick Grant's own copy/ with love Ted/ Sept. 1993". This would have been a particularly resonant gift given Grant's personal association with Buddhism - he served as a trustee and treasurer of the Jamyang Buddhist Centre in 2001-2008. He was simultaneously a trustee of the Farms for City Children charity established by Clare and Michael Morpurgo and in the mid 1980’s founded the St Clare Trust charity which supported projects occuring in developing countries.
Sacred Earth Dramas is a compilation of nine plays, the result of a world-wide playwriting contest inaugurated by The Sacred Earth Drama Trsut in 1990 with an ecological theme. The playwrights were invited to submit plays which revised and retold religious or mythological tales with specific relevance to the natural world today and the best, most healthy, way in which we can occupy it. These were judged in two categories; below fifteen and fifteen years and above with the winning entires published in this anthology.
In Toni Arthur's introduction she discusses the overwhelming response of the competition and their diverse deliveries; some even being written on rice paper or presented in video form, but exemplifies that what they all shared was a mutual "desperate cry from the heart to save what is left of our planet".
Ted Hughes himself writes a powerful foreword in which he underscores the concept that the opportunity for young people to address the issue of climate change and the destruction of our planet is integral to inducing change; ~"We knew that adults, parents and teachers watch childrens drama through the eyes of the child within themselves. It reaches them in ways they can never be reached if addressed simply as adults".
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