Crossings: A Fairy Play

A haunting fairy play from the poet who made the uncanny beautiful. When the Wildersham children are forced by their father's will to leave the city and occupy the isolated house called Crossings alone for a fortnight, they step into a world where the boundary between waking and dreaming grows dangerously thin. The house itself seems alive with presence: ghosts drift through passages, fairies beckon from moonlit gardens, and the children must ask themselves whether they are seeing true or merely conjuring visions from loneliness and imagination. De la Mare, writing in the shadow of the Great War, crafted a work about thresholds not merely as physical spaces but as emotional ones: the passage from childhood to something else, from the known world into the numinous, from the living into whatever waits beyond. First performed in 1919 by boys under fourteen, it retains the quality of a fever-dream told by children who have seen too much and understood just enough.