Journey into the west failed to break the torment for Ted Hughes 

Ted Hughes’s life was marked by tragedy, but a new play recollects happier days spent in Co Galway with Assia Wevill and their children, writes Richard Fizpatrick

ANN Henning Jocelyn has written a play about an intriguing chapter in the life of Ted Hughes.

In the spring of 1966, the late Poet Laureate lived with his lover Assia Wevill in Cashel, Connemara, in a cottage that lends itself to the title of her play, Doonreagan. The pair fled London to get some respite from the gossip that poisoned their relationship. Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath, had killed herself in 1963; a year after he’d started an affair with Wevill.