Liberty

April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad. When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror?

Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies, panic legislation and political correctness all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif. The poet Glyn Maxwell (whose Lifeblood was voted best play by the British Theatre Guide in 2005) brings a colloquial verse of great fluidity and immediacy to a story that is both fresh and relevant.