The Play of Gilgamesh

Edwin Morgans verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgameshs quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and disappeared political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss.