Love letters and closet seagulls

Following on from the very successful Burns Night, the motto for next Monday and Tuesday’s feast in The House of St David is ‘Feed me til I want no more’. A ticket includes a fab dinner of tarts with Welsh flavours and clever evocations of Welsh rarebit and cake as well as cultural slap-up nourishment with Welsh performance ingredients.

First up, story teller, Megan Lloyd, travels to St Leonard’s to share her knowledge of Welsh myth and folklore. She’s a revered regular on the Cardiff story telling circuit and her circus skills and dance background ensure that her delivery is anything but traditional. Performing in the story bar, she’ll be bouncing off shelves of Conwy ales and, in between slots, she’ll be offering you the chance to pen some tales and zip them along a message wire to another table.

Francis Maxey brings his knowledge of Welsh words over from Cardiff too. A word wizard, clown and slack rope performer, he’s running a riddle bar and juggling with words that have rich, poor, distant and badly behaved relations in other languages. To fuel your riddle capacities, there’ll be a Brecon Gin bottle on the bar. In the room next door, St Leonard’s and Hastings actors, Kate Tym and John Knowles, will be juggling glorious love letters. They’re playing sweet shop owner, Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards the draper, the two who dreamily romance the night away in Under Milk Wood.

Explore the Arch comprises artists and viewers from various cultural backgrounds, exploring and celebrating a culture regardless of their ethnicity. The traditional celebrations attached to a day of observance are laid aside for fresh perspectives and accessible partaking. DJBrass is creating a Hiraeth room featuring the reminiscences of those with Welsh attachment from all over the world. She brings her poignant soundscape to Charlotte Snook’s beautiful drawings and sculpture, reflecting long summers in the Gower with Harry Snook.

There are love letters in this room too. You’ll have your own opportunity to write a love letter, if you fancy it. Maybe the one you wish you’d written but never did? Or perhaps a note of adoration that, in an imaginary world, would have been so much fun to pen.

On the subject of adoration, have you found that week on week, the seagulls down here on the Hastings coast get into your bins, on your window sill, into your chimney pot? In Medieval poet, Daffyd ap Gwilym’s world, they’ve settled down and nested in his head. Fiona Hardy invites you to step into a Daffyd Ap Gwilym poem, literally – and there’s a chance to physically walk through extracts from Welsh rover, Richard Fenton’s travel diaries from the early C19.

You can wander through the whole of this fit-to-bursting house at your leisure, dipping in and out of rooms, food available in all the nooks and crannies. And connecting the two floors of delight, a spectacular Nye Bevan stairway to NHS heaven featuring a copper wire harp sculpture containing Bevan’s visionary words. It’s magical.

The House of St David has been imagined and is being created by a collective of exploring artists. “We’d love to share it with you. Come and explore.”

Monday 29 Feb and Tuesday 1 March, 7.30–10pm
Tickets available from the website.
For more information call: 01424 576069
or email: explorers@explorethearch.com

Also in: Performance