Adrian Mitchell (1932 - 2008)
Adrian Mitchell was one of the UK's most foremost poets and playwrights. He was known for a long, varied career which ranged from anti-war poetry, protest speeches, and a lifetime's worth of plays and general poetry. Alongside his work for adults, in the last few decades of his life he began writing a long cycle of plays aimed at students, teenagers, and children. These were often written with Mitchell's large family in mind.
His play of Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice novels is particularly faithful to the books in the way most stage adaptations are not, which we can perhaps attribute to Mitchell being educated at Christ Church Oxford, where Dodgson himself was a resident all those centuries ago...
SELECTED ADRIAN MITCHELL WORK:
Just Adrian (Biography)
For Beauty Douglas: Collected Poems 1953–79
Heart on the Left: Poems 1953–1984
The Shadow Knows: Poems 2001–2004
Three Plays with Songs, 2003.
Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005–2008
Animal Farm (George Orwell adaptation, play, with Peter Hall, 1984)
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S Lewis adaptation, Play, 1998)
Umpteen Pockets, Children's poems (2009)