What I discovered was a fascinating and strange text: a play notionally about a key historical event, deeply involved in the rough and tumble of 13th-century politics, but which also – like all historical dramas – is eloquent about the time in which it was composed. It wasn’t until I began talking to a BBC radio producer about how the most radical playwright of his generation came to write a play about Magna Carta that I thought to investigate further. I have the dimmest of recollections of reading it as a student, somewhere between better-known Arden texts such as Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and Live Like Pigs, but little more than that. Even by the standards of one of the most unjustly neglected playwrights of the late 20th century, Left-Handed Liberty counts as an obscurity. Apart from a BBC radio version broadcast the following year, it has rarely been revived since. Written to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the sealing of the charter, it was performed for a single week in June 1965 in front of visiting dignitaries and press-ganged schoolchildren. If your list included a play called Left-Handed Liberty by the English playwright John Arden you would be doing very well indeed. It might be perhaps the most famous legal document in history, and might have inspired everything from an album by Jay-Z to medievalised novels by the cartload, but theatre has remained resistant to its charms. James Goldman’s 1966 The Lion in Winter? John is portrayed as a sulky teenage prince, still decades away from his clash with the barons.

George Peele’s 1580s The Troublesome Reign of King John? Ditto. I f you had to name a play about Magna Carta, how far would you get? Shakespeare’s King John? Famous for not including any mention of the great charter.

Rj yeatman