FROM MARGARET MORRIS VIA KITTY JAY TO MEGAN DAVID

In 1910 John Galsworthy met the young dancer Margaret Morris while he was working in the theatre in London. Margaret worked with him on the choreography for his play The Little Dream , and later acted the part of Guinevere Megan in another Galsworthy play The Pigeon. They entered into a love affair which, though never consummated, was intense, as described by Margaret in her book My Galsworthy Story (1967), and intimated in Galsworthy’s letters to her.

MED Theatre’s play Chasing Kitty Jay examines the inspiration behind Galsworthy’s short story The Apple Tree, set at a farm which is an amalgam of Ford and Wingstone in Manaton. The play puts forward the suggestion that in the Kitty Jay legend Galsworthy found the means to creating an objective correlative  – the story of Megan David and her betrayed love for Frank Ashurst – to express the pain of having to renounce Margaret’s love. In this respect Chasing Kitty Jay is a work that makes an original contribution to the history of the development of a modern myth through dramatic speculation.