Hard as it may be to imagine an ancient Britain whose capital was Tamworth, the purpose of the Hoard festival – a month of dramas inspired by the discovery, in 2009, of the Staffordshire hoard – is to do precisely that.
There are 19 plays in total, ranging from main-stage commissions to tête-à-tête encounters with Mercian warriors in the bar. But a good place to start is Unearthed, a verbatim piece collated and directed by Theresa Heskins, which tells the story of how the world’s most significant cache of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver was discovered by a man with a metal detector, near Lichfield.
It’s billed as “an archeological whodunnit”, though it might be more accurate to describe Heskins’s documentary as a compelling who-left-it, since no one knows who the treasure belonged to or what it was for. As one expert puts it: “The only thing we can be certain of is that it is not a dragon’s hoard, as the dragon that sat on it would have to be the size of a small labrador.”
Jemma Kennedy’s The Gift presents the romantic yet grittily plausible supposition that the treasure was collateral in the religious schism caused by the spread of Christianity among pagan tribes. “They say this new religion preaches chastity and mildness,” complains one of the village matriarchs. “What use is that to us?”
For sheer entrancing oddity, however, it is hard to beat Caroline Horton’s solo performance Tranklements, in which a woman called Mercia reconnects with her Staffordshire roots by staging a potted history of the Potteries in a toolbox, before transforming into a pigeon. Horton’s homecoming tale draws genuine tears of emotion: what’s most remarkable is that, for all her surreal flights of fancy, the quality of Mercia is never strained.
• At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 25 July. Box office: 01782 717962
