John Hodge

Detailed historical account of Barry Railway and docks

This volume takes the Western Valley line from Aberbeeg to Ebbw Vale, taking in the coal and steel industry, which was served by the railway.

Alex Garland's acclaimed debut novel was adapted for the screen by John Hodge, whose distinctive cinematic vision was responsible for the screenplays of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

Set in the appropriately Gothic surroundings of contemporary Edinburgh, Shallow Grave presents a trio of affluent characters whose feckless lives are disrupted when they discover the corpse of their recently arrived flatmate, plus a suitcase bulging with money beneath his bed.

Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him, of course: Spud, Sick Boy, and Frank Begbie. But they are not alone. Other old friends are waiting too: sorrow, loss, joy, vengeance, hatred, friendship, love, and mortal danger.

The South Wales Valley lines, of the former Great Western Railway are an area of railway history that has not been properly covered by historians.

Taking its inspiration from historical fact, Collaborators explores the intense, paradoxical, and ultimately deadly friendship between the dissident writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Josef Stalin, centering around a play which Bulgakov was forced to write to commemorate Stalin's sixtieth birthday. Stalin has been in power for 16 years and his purges are at their zenith. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is lying unpublished in a desk drawer, and his latest play Molière has been banned following terrible reviews in Pravda. As a secret policeman dryly puts it, this has opened up a convenient ?gap in his schedule.? This ?gap? is to be filled by a play of Stalin's life which Bulgakov will write. The NKVD has even kindly found him an office in the notorious Lubyanka prison: a venue that would focus any writer's mind. But as Bulgakov loses himself in a world of secrets, threats, and paradoxes, and begins to fall ill from the liver disease that would eventually kill him, his feverish dreams of conversations with Stalin become reality in his brain, just as the state's lies become truths in his play. Collaborators is a darkly comic portrait of the impossible choices facing any artist in a dictatorship.

And the monster always wins. John Hodge's blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny. Collaborators by John Hodge premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2011.