Sam Boardman-Jacobs

Sam Boardman-Jacobs (born 1942) is a Welsh playwright, director scenographer and recently choreographer, having studied for an MA at Laban.

Boardman-Jacobs was Reader in Theatre & Media Drama at the University of Glamorgan. His research interests include Holocaust drama, Yiddish theatre, gay and lesbian theatre, Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, and the Spanish Civil War.^[1] These interests are reflected in his plays.

He won acclaim^[2] for his work on Holocaust and Yiddish drama with the Manchester Youth Theatre and received a grant from the European Association of Jewish Culture in 2002 for his play Trying To Be, an exploration of Jewish identity set in contemporary Britain.^[3] Sam recently took an MA in Choreography at Laban, London, and now makes choreographic dance theatre with Found Reality Dance Theatre, Cardiff, of which he is artistic director.

Play Federico For Me is the fictional story of Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, who, during her exile after the Spanish Civil War, depends upon the ghost of Federico García Lorca, in her political-artistic battle with Eva Perón over the first performance of Lorca's "The House of Bernarda Alba". His translation and adaptation of Lorca's El público was produced by the Found Reality Theatre Company in 2005. His 2007 radio play, The Sixth Column Has Better Legs, describes the experiences of four chorus girls in Madrid while the city is under siege.

Passion for the Impossible tells the story of Violette Leduc and Jean Genet in wartime Paris and Red Hot and Blue is the story of singer Libby Holman, on the night before her suicide, as she looks back over a life that included a murder trial, an affair with Montgomery Clift and early Civil Rights campaigning during the Second World War.

In 2003 he taught for the Lemonia Disabled Writers' Residential Course, a project organised by Graeae Theatre Company, Writernet and Tŷ Newydd.^[4] The production of his 2004 play, Embracing Barbarians, based on the political and sexual fantasies of dying Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, Sam attempted to make the piece accessible to both deaf and hearing performers and audiences, while casting a deaf performer in the role of a hearing character.^[5]

He was also a scriptwriter for 12 years on BBC Radio 4's The Archers and one of the writers for Channel 4's Brookside. He translates from Spanish to English.

Stage plays

• Someone Else’s Rainbow, 1979
• Setting Out For Ithaca 1980
• Farblas! 1996
• Play Federico For Me, 1998
• Passion for the Impossible, 1999
• Asylum, 2001
• Trying To Be, 2002
• Why Is This Night?, 2003
• Embracing Barbarians, 2004
• The Public 2005 (English translation from Lorca's El Público)
• Red Hot & Blue 2007

Radio plays

• Her Name Was Milena 1982
• Last Friday in Jerusalem 1984
• Fanny Rosen's Bad Debt 1985
• After Every Dream 1988
• Facing the Sun 1986
• After Every Dream 1988
• Doesn't Everyone Live in a Ballroom? 1991
• Hangover Square (dramatised from Patrick Hamilton's novel) 1994
• The Abduction of Esther Lyons, 1999
• One Pair of Hands, (5 Part Series) 2001 (adaptation of the novel by Monica Dickens)
• The Sixth Column Has Better Legs (5-part series) 2007

Dance theatre productions

with Found Reality Dance Theatre:

• Soft Murders (three dance theatre pieces based on the paintings of three gay artists: Gilbert & George, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon. Chapter Arts Theatre; Atrium Theatre Cardiff; Cardiff and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals.

References

External links

• Radio Plays