WORKING-class history will be brought to life in Stratford through music.
Folk band Faustaus is bringing their ‘Cotton Lords Tour’ to the RSC’s The Other Place on Saturday November 17.
The band has gathered its material from the Cotton Famine Poetry project – an archive based at University of Exeter holding poems written by workers during the infamous Lancashire famine.
Some 400,000 cotton workers lost their jobs after the US Civil war stopped cotton from reaching the shores in the 1860s and many turned to poetry to describe the misery of their poverty-stricken existence.
Hundreds of poems – written in the Lancashire dialect – were published in local newspapers or written as letters and had been long forgotten before the project was launched earlier this year.
The three-piece band includes Paul Sartin, Benji Kirkpatrick and Saul Rose who spent hours poring over the poetry to create the songs.
Visit www.rsc.org.uk/faustus for more information and tickets.
