King Arthur in Avalon

Seven years after Racine at the Girls' School, John Spurling wrote a second play for the Cheltenham Ladies' College to perform at the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature.

Judi Bond, the Head of the Drama Department, was again the director, Michelle Walton again created authentic costumes and this time the College's Princess Hall was itself a plus factor. Equipped with long fretted wooden galleries in Victorian Gothic style, with painted Pre-Raphaelite figures over the proscenium arch and Pre-Raphaelite stained glass windows at the back of the hall, this interior had been somewhat out of keeping with the world of Racine and Louis XIV, but it came straight out of the world of Tennyson's poems and Burne-Jones's paintings.

John Spurling:

"It may seem perverse to write a play with a large cast of mainly male characters specifically for a girls' school. But is it more so than to try to stage the story of a legendary hero who lived - if he lived at all – a millennium and a half ago and whose story is in fact a mass of conflicting stories? Is it more so than to paint pictures based on the legend – as Burne-Jones did – which are sharply realistic in detail, but blatantly imaginary. His warriors look like women, his women like angels and his costumes and settings belong to a romantic Victorian Middle Ages that never was.

"Plays have many functions: as entertainments, social commentaries, satires, dramatic poems. But their prime pleasure and purpose for me, both as writer and member of the audience, are to admit me to a world of the imagination. I have been drawn to the imaginary kingdom of King Arthur, in the way some people are drawn to actual places – China or India or America – since I was a teenager. Several times I have started plays about it and then broken off in despair, trying but failing to reach the historical figure of Arthur and bypass the powerful Victorian fantasy created by Tennyson and Burne-Jones in particular.

"It was only when I faced up to the fact that, like it or not, their version was the way I imagined King Arthur that I found the way into my imagined world. I had been trying, as it were, to travel due westwards to China without bumping into America.

"It was a 'strange land', as Burne-Jones put it, 'more true than real', and, to get at the truth, it was necessary in some way to evade realism. My solution was to frame the play with Burne-Jones himself , to make the whole story retrospective – Arthur's dreams of his lost kingdom after his disappearance to Avalon – and write it for an all-female cast.

"Is this another way of saying that the subject itself – idealism, human perfection, the attempt by humans to overcome the negative aspects of themselves and their societies – everything we mean by King Arthur's "Camelot" – is perverse, against nature, doomed to be undermined and brought to dust? This was certainly what I got back – now in my place as a member of the audience – from Judi Bond's bewitching production on a set based on Burne-Jones's last painting, with a cast of performers totally wrapped up in the story.

"Here at last was the kingdom I imagined, beautiful, idealistic, passionately alive. Yet, from that fatal moment when Guenevere processed through the audience up to the stage to be received by Arthur and wedded under Merlin's mistletoe, it was a kingdom that was evidently ephemeral, too dream-like, tragically impossible, more true than real. It was precisely the play I'd dreamed of since I was the same age as the girls who performed it and the whole experience seemed almost too real to be true."