About
A special archive film show by Ray Johnson celebrating the centenary of author and poet John Wain.
About the show
John Wain was born in the Potteries in 1925, the son of a prosperous local dentist, Arnold Wain, who had worked himself up from a beginning in almost unbelievable poverty and ill health to become a respected local citizen, magistrate, lay preacher and one step away from Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent.
John went to school locally and achieved a First in English at St. John's College, Oxford, in 1946. After a period as Fereday Fellow at that college he took a job as a lecturer in English at Reading University. A couple of years after the success of his first novel in Hurry On Down in 1953 he resigned from his post at the University, and after a few years living in London he settled in Wolvercote, on the edge of Oxford.
As a professional writer his output was varied and prolific: novels, short stories, journalism, autobiography and Belles Lettres, criticism, travel writing, plays for radio, TV and the stage and, of course, poetry – which he never stopped writing no matter what else was going on in his life.
He and his fellow "Angry Young Men" were practically household names in the mid 1950s: Penguin published all his novels in paperback for 25 years. In the 1970s he published a successful biography of Samuel Johnson and was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In 1984 he won the Whitbread Best Novel Award for Young Shoulders, which was dramatised on BBC1, and in the same year he was made a CBE for services to literature.
He produced some of his best verse later in life, as well as Dear Shadows, a collection of essays on people he had known who had passed on – including Richard Burton, Marshall McLuhan and his own father. His final work was Johnson is Leaving, a moving study on the last days of Dr. Johnson's life – this had its first public airing in Wain's old college at Oxford a few days after he died in 1994.
In the 1970s and 80s it gave him a lot of pleasure to be an on-hand 'textual advisor' at the Victoria Theatres in Stoke then Newcastle - and even more pleasure for the Vic to stage, in 1975, his own play Harry in the Night. (Will Wain, 1999)
"I am giving them [the people of the Potteries] a slice of the truth as I have learnt about it by living it for fifty years, and it is the same as their truth. Harry, when his life crumbles about him, finds new strength not from some spectacular fresh beginning, some road-to-Damascus religious vision, but simply from usefulness and productive work, from the sense that he has skills and knowledge that are needed and so can respect himself. He makes his new freedom out of the sober, industrious habits of his old slavery… This is something I learned by growing up among these people and realising what keeps them alive in their often monotonous and drab surroundings – alive, and full of zest and humour and courage." (John Wain, 1977)
This Celebration event will feature new interviews with John Wain's sons Will and Ianto and others, readings of extracts and poems, plus actual recordings of John Wain from the Victoria Theatre Archive: reading some of his poems at the Vic in 1975 plus an extract from the Victoria Theatre dress rehearsal of his play Harry in the Night, with John himself reading the part of Big Sam.
Tickets
£5 general admission
