Description: "A new play by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, exploring the fraught friendship between master painters Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin"--
Brief description: Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.
Review Quotes: "[The] language [of O Starry Starry Night] is what you would expect from the Nobel laureate--rich, seductive, scopious, with lines echoing Shakespeare at one moment then scatological the next; yet always perfectly, poetically devised for the page . . . Something of Beckett's Waiting for Godot --with its pair of two human beings feeding off one another--flows through the veins of this. Beyond the glimmer of the stars, candles, street lamps and paintings onstage are questions of loneliness; of love. At moments you can't help but chuckle at Walcott's deadpan and often sly sense of humor . . . This is a play well-worth seeing, if only for Walcott's language. It is certainly a play worth reading . . . Here is a play about love, not necessarily in a carnal sense but about creative tension; about what we leave behind after we die; about who we love and why; who we are permitted to love; and who we permit ourselves to love. The question at the heart of the proceedings is whether love, in whatever form, is not itself a kind of ecstatic madness. Both characters are in an eternal dialogue: one is concerned with ideas, another pragmatism. Neither would have been the same without the other. The ultimate play about one of history's most famous bro-mances." --Andre Bagoo, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday