Love, creativity and shadows

Chasing the Light is about the relationship between a woman and her husband, between love and need, between loving and writing. It is an account of an often difficult and threatened relationship between a troubled, creative man and the wife who made and cared for his homes and his children and enabled his work. The play is coloured by the traditional English folk music that was so important to the Thomases.

Edward and Helen met while Helen’s father, John Noble – journalist and literary critic – was mentoring Edward’s early work as a writer. Gradually they fell deeply in love and despite family disapproval and unpromising circumstances, they married. They had three children together and lived in a series of rented cottages first in the Weald of Kent and then in the hangers above Petersfield. Thanks very largely to Helen’s untiring work after Edward’s death at the Battle of Arras in 1917, just four years after turning his hand to the writing of poetry, Edward is a well-known and loved poet. Much less is known, now, about his unassuming, self-deprecating, dedicated and extremely capable, eloquent wife. This play sets out to redress that balance, by bringing her own words into the light.

From her childhood in Lancashire through her first encounters with Edward in London and the several rented homes they lived in with their three children, Helen weathered frequent spells of poverty as well as the darknesses of Edward’s depression.

The play is based closely on Under Storm’s Wing by Helen Thomas, written after the death of her husband Edward in France in 1917. The play was suggested by the Edward Thomas Fellowship and Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery.