Preview: Home For Christmas: Carol Ann Duffy

THERE’S a festive feel at The Studio of the Festival Theatre, this evening, when Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy performs new and familiar work with local musician, composer and actor, John Sampson, in Home For Christmas.

Carol Ann Duffy and John Sampson. Pic: Comp

Reading poems, including The Christmas Truce, the pair will be joined by ‘poetry band’ Little Machine, who will perform a selection of Duffy’s poems as carols.

Part of The Home Straits, a programme of work curated for Homecoming Scotland 2014, Home For Christmas: A Night with Carol Ann Duffy, John Sampson and Little Machine explores the comforts and constrictions of home.

Multi-instrumentalist Sampson - he plays trumpet, recorder, shalmie pipe, crumhorn, gemshorn and cornettino - has been collaborating with Duffy for more than 11 years, while Little Machine are famed for setting classic poems to music, drawing on 3000 years of poetry by everyone from Sappho to Chaucer, Shakespeare to Blake, Byron to Larkin and many more.

Home For Christmas: A Night with Carol Ann Duffy, John Sampson and Little Machine, The Studio/Festival Theatre, tonight, 7.30pm, £12, 0131-529 6000