Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Another term, another great run of plays from York’s award-winning Drama Soc. Here’s the low-down on the first two of Spring’s dramatic delights. Sexual fantasies about horses and monologues of madness?! You know you want to go, go, go!
Week 2: Equus by Peter Schaffer
Written in 1973, Equus tells the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man, Alan Strang, who has a sexual fascination with horses. Inspired to write Equus when he heard of a crime involving a 17-year-old who had blinded six horses in a small town near London, Shaffer set out to construct a fictional account of what might have caused the incident, without knowing any of the details of the crime. The play's action, then, takes the form of something of a detective story, involving the attempts of the psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, to understand the cause of the boy's actions. With its original production starring Peter Firth (of Spooks fame) and adapted into a film with Richard Burton, Equus was revived in 2007 with Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, in the role of Alan Strang, which caused some controversy as the role required the then 17 year old Radcliffe to appear naked on stage. Will the Drama Barn’s production feature nudity..? Go find out for yourselves…
Week 3: A Trilogy of Madness: adaptations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper'‘, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart
The Trilogy of Madness takes the form of three half an hour monologues adapted from short stories all based around the theme of madness.
The first takes the form of a series of journal entries and is considered an important early example of American feminist literature, indicative of attitudes toward women's physical and mental health in the 19th century. The narrator is a woman whose husband has sequestered her to the upstairs bedroom of their summer. Forbidden from working and having to hide her journal entries from her husband, the woman is left to recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a ‘a slight hysterical tendency’. The windows of the room are barred, there is a gate across the top of the stairs and with nothing to stimulate her, the woman becomes obsessed by the pattern and colour of the room's wallpaper…
Diary of a Madman is claimed to be one of the earliest portrayals of schizophrenia. It centres on the life of Poprishchin, a low-ranking civil servant. He yearns to be noticed by a beautiful woman, the daughter of a senior official, with whom he has fallen in love. His diary records his gradual descent into insanity. As his madness develops, he begins to believe things like a love affair between two dogs, believing he has discovered letters sent between them…
The Tell-Tale Heart is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and one of Poe's most famous short stories. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a 'vulture eye'. The murder is carefully planned and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and concealing it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards …
In the barn, these monologues will be lit up by three projections aimed at each wall. Hoping to be a collaboration of the strengths of both film and theatre, with advanced post production effects and live visual editing being alongside intense performances, The ’Trilogy of Madness’ promises to be unmissable.
All productions run from Friday to Sunday. Performances begin at 7.30pm and tickets are available on the door.
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