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John
Guilgud Theatre Man Equals Man was written in 1925 in the final years of The Weimar Republic. Set in a fantasy somewhere in the British Empire in the mythical town of Kilkoa, this anarchic work is a young writer’s protest against the folly of imperialism and war. At the heart of the drama is Galy Gay, the porter who goes out to buy a fish for his wife’s dinner and ends up shanghaied into the British Army. Gay, rather like the Good Soldier Shweyk, is the little man caught up in a war he knows nothing about. He is at first the innocent who is embroiled in the machinations of warmongering, but who ends up as the triumphant soldier glorying in mass murder. This multidimensional play is not didactic but a political entertainment with elements of pure absurdity. Certainly it is a prophetic protest against German nationalism disguised as a British history. It is sometimes Kipling-esque, sometimes Chaplin-esque and often burlesque. Man Equals Man contains dramatic elements which are developed in the later, more famous texts. Widow Begbick foreshadows Mother Courage as she follows the soldiers to war. She also sings and establishes the Vermfremdungseffekt, which we wrongly translate as Alienation, when the German word means ‘to make strange’. Actors who are only schooled in Stanislavsky will be mystified by Man Equals Man which owes much more to English Victorian music hall techniques than any other genre. This is a raw work with savage humour, and a deep meditation on the struggle between individual will and the desire to be one of the crowd. Julia
Pascal (Director) GBS
Theatre Harley Granville-Barker’s fourth play (first produced in 1910) marks a turning point in his quest for a new form of drama. Each of the four acts are as individual as their London settings – from Denmark Hill to Peckham, then across the river to Bond Street and ending in fashionable Phillimore Gardens. The play centres around the Huxtable and Madras families, related by marriage and partners in a successful fashion house and drapery business – The Madras House. The protagonist, Philip Madras, wants to sell the business to an American millionaire and pursue his ambition to become a member of the London County Council. Tackling ideas of Liberalism, Capitalism, the commercial exploitation of workers, the position of women in Edwardian society, religion and Edwardian family values, The Madras House is a surprising comedy that showcases Granville-Barker as a playwright decades ahead of his time. Dawn
Walton (Director) Recent
work includes: 93.2fm (Royal Court and national tour); Winners (Young
Vic); Workers Writes, Rampage, Drag-On and The Shining (Royal Court);
Serjeant Musgraves’ Dance and Balm In Gilead (Corbett Theatre);
Glow (Theatre Centre); The Changeling (Mamamissi Productions); The
Blacks Young Vic Studio); Strings (Clean Break); Of Mice and Men (Southwark
Playhouse); Splinters (Talawa TC). Upcoming productions include Oxford
Street by Levi David Addai (Royal Court Theatre ’08). Jerwood
Vanbrugh Theatre Louisa May Alcott was 35 years old and already a successful author when her publisher Thomas Niles asked her to write “a book for girls”. The result was Little Women and its heroine Jo March – no stereotype of children’s fiction, but a living, breathing person filled with longing and contradiction. Little Women – The Musical is a charming and lively entertainment that captures all the passion and pathos of the March family saga. Filled with fine melodies and laced with stirring recreations of the “blood and guts” short stories that Jo writes in her attic studio, it also reflects Jo’s poignant struggle to assert her individuality as she tries to cope with growing up and the realisation that her beloved sisters and her best friend Laurie cannot remain “five for all forever”. The show has delighted audiences in the USA since it opened on Broadway in January 2005 and on a highly successful national tour. Now RADA is delighted to present its UK and European premiere. The music is by distinguished Broadway Music Director Jason Howland (who incidentally had the honour of conducting the final performance of Les Miserables at the Imperial Theater). Lyrics are by Mindi Dickstein, best-known in this country for her play Notes Across a Small Pond, produced by the Bridewell Theatre in London, and the book is by Allan Knee, who received a Richard Rodgers Musical Theater Award for Little Women. The RADA production is directed by Geoff Bullen, designed by Mark Simmonds, the Music Director is Michael Haslam and Darren Royston is the choreographer: the team responsible for RADA’s widely-admired production of Sondheim’s Assassins in 2005. Geoff
Bullen (Director) Outside of RADA, he directed Cavalleria Rusticana for Magdala Opera, the Edinburgh Festival premieres of Beside Picasso (Brian McAvera) and Bacon (Pip Utton), the first performance of David Rudkin’s Red Sun for a national tour, and The Tempest at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. AJTC is currently touring his production of Charles Way’s adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel On The Black Hill, and Pip Utton’s Chaplin opened at the Edinburgh Festival this year. Supported
by Ping-Kern Ng John
Gielgud Theatre A number of Howard Barker’s plays are radical responses to historical figures, events or existing library texts: Scenes from an Execution (the female Renaissance artist, Artemisia Gentileschi), Gertrude and Seven Lears (Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear), Women Beware Women (a distillation and extension of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean play) and Uncle Vanya (a rage against Chekhov’s complacency). While writing about one thing, Barker casts light upon another, and by showing the past makes us see the full terror of the present. Barker’s language alternates between the dense and the luminous, with cascades of ideas and characters that bear no resemblance to the models of contemporary naturalism. Ursula is inspired by Cranach the Elder’s painting of the Massacre of the Virgin Martyrs. According to the 1,000 year old legend, St Ursula led 11,000 virgins down the Rhine to escape Huns or husbands. Barker remakes the story starting with Ursula’s rejection of her proposed marriage to Prince Lucas, a man with sad eyes and 27 castles. While Lucas is a forceful presence in the play, the true antagonist is Placida, who has formal charge of Ursula and the other seven virgins represented. You may think that virginity is not a subject of particular interest to the modern Western world. Yet the play’s examination of the role of mothers, spiritual and sexual ecstasy, shame, the annihilation of self, and the sticky nature of love – coagulating pools where it is least expected and wanted – addresses us as urgently as it would have done 1,000 years ago. Please note this performance contains nudity, strong language and a smoke machine Melanie
Jessop (Director) In
2003 Melanie was a guest artist at the University of South Florida’s
BRIT programme where she GBS
Theatre All That Fall was written for BBC Radio and was first broadcast in 1957. During his lifetime Beckett was opposed to the idea of staging the play, although attempts were made in Germany and on television. This is probably the first public staging in this country. All That Fall is unusual in being the only Beckett play set in Ireland, with characters presumably drawn from the Protestant community of his childhood. The play is conceived for radio in that it is made up of images created from sounds. These include a donkey and cart, a car and a journey to a railway station which set problems for the director and actors in the theatre. But the play has such wonderful character writing, particularly for the old couple, Dan and Maddy, that it invites being staged. Although superficially naturalistic it contains many of the themes and images of later Beckett plays, such as dragging feet which were to become a motif of Footfalls and it has the recurrent theme of the approach of death and the resilience, however misguided, of humans surrounded by the thought of mortality. William
Gaskill (Director) 18
March performance supported by the RADA Stars
Jerwood
Vanbrugh Theatre Lakeboat is David Mamet’s 1980 play in 28 scenes about the crew of a merchant marine ship working the Great Lakes. Their lives centre around their seemingly purposeless tasks on the boat, and around sex, gambling, booze and fighting – or at least talking about them. The dialogue is fast, sharp and full of the pent-up energy and conflicts of the characters. Mamet’s ear for the absurdity, humour and poetry of everyday speech, and his talent for expressing the poignancy of their fractured conversations, are abundantly evident. Prairie du Chien is similarly set in an enclosed, but mobile environment – this time a train, bearing an assorted collection of gamblers and drifters, and heading west through Wisconsin in the year 1910. A violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide is punctuated by the surface camaraderie and underlying menace of a card game. David Mamet is widely recognized as one of America’s finest living playwrights, author of Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow and American Buffalo. Note: Contains strong language Lindsay
Posner (Director) Performance Sponsor
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