There will be no partying under the dark skies of Brecon but the programme will go on with 80 events Ian McEwan once joked: “I don’t do research any more, I ask the audience at Hay.” The whole point of Hay festival is the celebratory pleasure of this audience and their dialogue with storytellers sharing big ideas. In the last three weeks we’ve reshaped the programme we’d been planning for the last 18 months into just 80 online events and we’ve been experimenting with tech platforms to keep that conversation going. I doubt we could ever have assembled the cast who’ll launch our Wordsworth 250 celebrations in real life. Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory, Jonathan Pryce, Vanessa Redgrave are a dream team, reading around Shahidha Bari’s jewel-like nano-lectures. Nobel economists Esther Duflo and Paul Krugman can beam in this year as never before, and if we’re in need of a little less conversation of an evening, Royal Ballet superstar Fernando Montaño will be dancing the dying swan for us direct from his studio in LA, Helena Bonham Carter joins Allie Esiri’s Shakespeare show, Inua Ellams updates his magical Evening with an Immigrant for the time of coronavirus, Stephen Fry and Natalie Haynes tell different sides of the story from Troy, and guitarist David Gilmour will be playing a Von Trapped family concert to celebrate Polly Samson’s beautiful novel about Leonard Cohen’s Greek summer _A Theatre for Dreamers_. Continue reading...
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com |
