Gone to Earth

Mary Webb is best-known today as the novelist whose work was satirised by Cold Comfort Farm.

But one of her earliest books, Gone to Earth (1917), has an innocence and a wildness - like its heroine - that can be truly affecting.

In dramatising the story of 17-year-old Hazel, the innocent and free-spirited country lass who is loved both by the wicked squire and the altruistic minister, Helen Edmundson has incorporated folk-dance, song and dialect into the rural Shropshire setting.

It is a style well-suited to Shared Experience, the theatre company who so triumphantly staged Edmundson's adaptations of Anna Karenina and The Mill on the Floss.

Gone to Earth premieres in w/c 22 March in Brighton before touring the south of England including a season at the Lyric, Hammersmith.