Young Emma
The secret memoir of W.H. Davies Adapted for the stage by Laura Wade
The secret memoir of W.H. Davies Adapted for the stage by Laura Wade
Young Emma is a previously unpublished, candid exploration of W.H. Davies' quest for a young wife among London prostitutes in the 1920s.
About The Play
About The Play
TIME OUT CRITICS’ CHOICE
Young Emma is the brutally honest tale of a man’s search for a young wife among the prostitutes of 1920’s London. Unpublished for over 50 years and never brought to the stage … until now.
But who was its secret author? None other than the toast of the London literati, the one-legged Welsh poet W.H. Davies, then famous for his adventures across America in his bestselling book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.
Few knew that the author of such verse as ‘What is this life if full of care / We have no time to stand and stare?’ had decided to “trouble no more about respectable women but to find a wife in the common streets”.
Young Emma tells the unflinching, bawdy tale of Davies’ escapades, the many women he bedded, the venereal disease he developed and his dream of escaping London life.
The Sunday Telegraph described the book as “a masterpiece, and stranger than any fiction”, while Bernard Shaw called it “the record of a fully developed, vigorous, courageous, imaginative, and specifically talented adult – with the outlook of a slum boy of six or seven.”