I Forget How Nelson Died

I Forget How Nelson Died, under the title Different Circumstances, was first staged in Oxford in 1974. The play is centred on a reimagined Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, relocated in place and time to a remote island paradise mid-twentieth century. There a helicopter lands, and its crew disembarks, with the task of wooing the fatigued man of inaction back to England and to war. It’s an unlikely collision of modern and eighteenth-century sensibilities, but there the drama does not end. There is much more that can happen on a remote island out of time and out of mind.