Old Verily

By Joe Corrie

Price:

£1.00

Item attributes

ISBN:

978-0-85174-911-2

Acts:

1

Females:

2

Males:

2

Item details

Scottish Play: No. 179

From Wikipedia, Joe Corrie (13 May 1894 – 13 November 1968) was a Scottish miner, poet and playwright best known for his radical, working-class plays.

He was born in Slamannan, Stirlingshire in 1894. His family moved to Cardenden in the Fife coalfield when Corrie was still an infant and he started work at the pits in 1908. He died in Edinburgh in 1968.

Shortly after the First World War, Corrie started writing. His articles, sketches, short stories and poems were published in prominent socialist newspapers and journals, including Forward and The Miner.

Corrie's volumes of poetry include The Image O' God and Other Poems (1927), Rebel Poems (1932) and Scottish Pride and Other Poems (1955). T. S. Eliot wrote "Not since Burns has the voice of Scotland spoken with such authentic lyric note".  He turned to writing plays during the General Strike in 1926.

More information can be found on his Wikipedia page; Joe Corrie.

 

Israel Petrie, called Old Verily because he has been a fervent street-corner preacher for forty-years, is a domestic tyrant. Now a widower he dominates his two daughters.

Things reach a crisis when he forbids the younger daughter to marry because her fiance doesn't agree with his loud-voiced preaching and castigating. But the elder daughter, gaining a courage she has lacked for years, exposes her father for an act of cruelty to her mother long ago. A powerful play that will have a deep impression on the audience.

It has been accepted for publication in George G. Harrup and Co.'s volume The Best One-Act Plays of the Year.