A history, in fact, as old as poetry, inseparable from our earliest attempts at sense and our instinctive delight in the sounds we make. There is no poetry purer than Nonsense – except that it’s nonsense – and to try to make sense of Nonsense is in a sense to introduce all poetry.

With poems, jokes and skits – and the help of wonderful performers – the evening will guide us from the Troubadours to the Surrealists and beyond, with interludes along the way, wherever the threshold of nonsense is crossed, whether it be in the 17-century Inns of Courts, the works of Shakespeare, Swift, or Pope, the treasury of anonymous lyrics and Nursery Rhymes or those twin Victorian peaks, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

Children who are beginning to feel poetry is not for them and adults who have entirely given up are strongly encouraged to bring each other.