Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

by
May 2020, no. 421

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb 368 pp

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

by
May 2020, no. 421

For anyone feeling stir-crazy after weeks cooped up in self-isolation, A Theatre for Dreamers offers an appealing escape, a virtual vacation on the Greek island of Hydra. Dive into these pages and you can swim vicariously in a perfect horseshoe-shaped bay, dry off in the summer sun, admire countless young, scantily clad men and women, and end the day with a glass of retsina while you watch the moon set and listen to a young Leonard Cohen enunciate profundities about life and art.

Polly Samson’s novel is set in 1960, when eighteen-year-old Erica Hart travels from England to Hydra with her lover Jimmy and brother Bobby. Her pilgrimage is inspired by opening a copy of Charmian Clift’s book Peel Me A Lotus sent by the author, a friend of her mother’s, which arrives soon after her mother’s death from cancer. Clift’s writing about her creative, bohemian family life in Greece offers a vision of life beyond the stifling conformity of suburban England, an existence that Erica’s mother might have longed for, and one that Erica has the chance to embrace thanks to a surprising legacy of money that her mother sequestered from her weekly housekeeping allowance.

Kirsten Tranter reviews 'A Theatre for Dreamers' by Polly Samson

A Theatre for Dreamers

by Polly Samson

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb 368 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.