Hi, my name is actually Max Hafler . I am a 70 year old poet/playwright/director/author of Teaching Voice (2016) and “What Country Friends is This?”(2021:Nick Hern Books). Teacher of Voice and Acting Poetic text for the past 40 years. Drama Lecturer at NUIG(retired). check me out on www.maxhafler.wordpress.com.

I was the first co-winner of Apples and Snakes UK Performance poetry competition; My poemplays have included Winner of Sony Award for Albion Tower(BBC) which won a Sony Award in 1996; Writer/director of Alien Nation, (youth theatre poetry performance/ Cuirt International Literature Festival and This Means War! (adaptation of Lysistrata Cuirt 09).

THE HEART WARD is a series of dramatic poems which focus on a prolonged stay I had in hospital at Galway University Hospital . I believe poetic text can take us further and deeper than naturalistic work; that poetic images and psychology are profoundly connected. Spoken Word has a directness right into the heart of an audience. Only poetry could reach the inner world and the external alien world of the hospital with equal power.

I have spent time in hospital with a congenital condition called Spina Bifida Occulta, both as child and adult. The poetry I wrote in my recent hospital spell dug into the story of my adult relationship with the hospital system and my experience of being a disempowered child.

Hospital has the rhythm of a war; one moment you are comforted and safe; the next, in confusion, pain and danger. It changes patients, opens doors for kindness but also releases demons. Medicine is an inexact science. Nothing is certain. Medical staff are under stress and often do not register their impact on patients. What you are told can be a curious mixture of truth and lies. The piece defends the right of the patient to advocate for themselves.

I was saved as a baby at Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom the author J.M Barrie gave much of his revenue from the play Peter Pan. Pan is an archetype in the poems, as The Patient struggles to balance his adult reality with the tortuous reality of his childhood, wanting to live but accepting the possibility of death, something common to us all.

What will the money be used for? I firmly believe that artists have to be paid and whilst raising 6000 is minimal I have to reach a realistic target within eight weeks. The piece will be a dramatised reading with four professional performers and a specially composed score requiring a week's rehearsal time. The more money we get, the closer we can get to a fuller production. We are also planning to do talkbacks with medical students (an area I and my co-director Declan Drohan have both worked in, through drama) and there will be three performances. Despite generous, inkind support from the Cuirt, a box-office split and support from the university, we need to raise this 7000 to go ahead. We did apply for Arts Council support but unfortunately we did not get it. It is annoying rather than anything else and no reflection of the work, nor on the professionals who have committed to this project.

Please try and make this happen. I am hoping that the initial performance dates will be only the start of this project and it will be taken on by others. Everyone who has read it sees its value, not only from an artistic point of view but in serving the experience of patients, doctors and medical staff.

Whatever you give, we will keep you posted how we are doing, and send updates on the project.

Here is a 6 minute film when Golden Hoops Films came to a weekend development workshop.

https://youtu.be/t_b1bqN9o_0

https://youtu.be/9eMtywLCpAQ

(The second video is one of the poems actually read on location in the hospital, The photos are from development workshops of the piece and of the UCG Hospital )

Plans are afoot to present the piece in the spring of next year initially and then later into the autumn.