Dorchester Community Play- ‘Drummer Hodge’

I am currently commissioned to write a new community play for Dorchester in Dorset, and am now working on the second draft. Provisionally titled ‘Drummer Hodge’ the play is set in the first decade of the 20th Century and portrays the imagined ‘back-story’ of the Hodge family which includes the eponymous drummer boy of the well known Thomas Hardy poem. 

The town’s community rallies to the nation’s call for volunteers to join the Boer War in South Africa in 1900. Drummer Hodge – along with others- signs up for the cause. As news filters back of the imposition by the British government of concentration camps, and the genocide of Boer women and children, the town is forced to confront the value or otherwise of the sacrifice of their men.