"Who was Robert Service: the writer of The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew is perhaps the best-known English-language poet of the twentieth century, and certainly the richest, he refused to call himself anything more than a rhymester. A shy man and a dreamer, he played dozens of roles in his life, often with costumes to match, while plunging into each masquerade, with the intensity of a professional - from Klondike Canada, to the Paris underworld, Tahiti, Hungary and Soviet Russia - his wanderlust took him to difficult corners of the globe where, to his delight, he was unrecognizable."

Pierre Berton - Prisoners of the North

 

At Your Service - The Life and Yarns of Robert Service - My Glorious Youth. The first chapter in two parts of the amazing life and adventures of Robert Service, freely adapted for the stage from his autobiography The Ploughman of the Moon.

 

My Glorious Youth - Part One - Childhood

Begins with Service’s early run in with the law that lands him as the ward of his Grandfather and Great Aunt in the Ayrshire Countryside of Scotland. He revels in: The poetic influences; Burns, Longfellow, Yeats and Shakespeare. The landscape; rivers, forests and highlands. And his most influential of inspirations, the callow friendship of his ‘outsider’ best of pals, Pat Doughan. 

 

My Glorious Youth - Part Two - Boyhood

We follow Robert through his adolescence as he discovers a passion for words, in song, poem and plays. But oh the mischief that wee laddie and his best pal Pat get up too; pugilism, provocation and poetry. Part Two reveals all the early influences that set him on his first grand adventure to the wilds of Canada where he becomes the people’s poet: The voice of the Klondike.