PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

July 24, 2021, matinée

SHAKESPEARE’S RAPE OF LUCRECE: A ONE-WOMAN, DRAMATIC ADAPTATION WITH MUSIC

Elena Pellone; PRODUCTION: Elena Pellone

Actress Elena Pellone will offer a dramatic performance of Shakespeare’s moving and harrowing narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, accompanied by original live music.

Rape of Lucrece is a theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s narrative poem by the actor Elena Pellone and musicians Katherine Abbott and Simon Kemp. The black box theatre will put on an old red velvet costume of a nineteenth-century music hall. By footlights and candlelight we interrogate the shadows cast by the myths that occupy our history, our unconscious, and continue to repeat themselves in disturbing ways. With original music, we cast a spell: looking into the mirror of the past we see ourselves in the unforgiving light of our future. The play is an indictment of rape culture, the relentless perpetuation of female adoration, misogyny and shame. It will give space to survivors’ stories. No-one wins in Shakespeare’s bleak look at possession, rape, perverted desire and the empty drive of capitalist longing.  

“And so, by hoping more, they have but less,  

Or, gaining more, the profit of excess  

Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain 

That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.” 

Lucrece feels the only choice is for her to kill herself. Can we change the narrative? 

July 24, 2021, evening

POOR, POOR, LEAR

Nina Sallinen: PRODUCTION Nina Sallinen

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0758592/bio

Finnish actress Nina Sallinen plays Nina Sallinen (no relation), a 90-year-old Grande Dame of the Finnish stage.  After personally welcoming the audience at the door with promises of wine and cookies for intermission, she attempts to relive her greatest theatrical triumph from decades past: to perform a one-woman version of King Lear.  Ms. Sallinen will play all of the parts.  Unfortunately time has taken its toll on the elder Sallinen.  She can’t quite remember the play or what it was about, but it doesn’t matter. The entire performance is a device to chasten her two daughters who have treated her poorly.  The young women have not only ignored Sallinen’s requests for help and affection, they are actively trying to get her moved into an old folks home so they can split the bounty of the elder Sallinen’s estate.  None of this matters because the two daughters, the “guests of honor” for the performance, never show up.  Amidst the shattered pieces of her life and memory and the play itself, we are left seeing the artist alone and afraid facing both oblivion and eternity.  In its unforgettable conclusion the audience realizes they have witnessed a potent and powerful reimagining of Lear.

July 25, 2021, matinée

Guilford School of Acting: SHAKESPEARE FOR BREAKFAST

Produced and performed by students from the Guildford School of Acting, UK.  Originally by William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Jaq Bessell

Who needs a McMuffin when you can have some Macbeth?  Why have an omelette when you can have a Hamlet?

A small company of actors will serve up a smorgasbord of scenes from Shakespeare’s most popular plays, performed in Shakespeare’s hallmark style: no sets, no lighting, but plenty of pace.  A feast for the imagination, running at just under one hour, this is fast food of the very best kind. 

July 25, 2021, evening

SO NOW I HAVE CONFESSED THAT HE IS THINE…

EROTIC TRAJECTORIES

Produced by Lit Moon Theatre Company (https://www.litmoontheatre.com/), Santa Barbara, California

Shakespeare’s plays are rich with the joys and perils of erotic entanglement.  So are the sonnets.  In this mixed media performance, a small handful of sonnets interweave to create a story of love and loss, of passion and its betrayal. Using acting, music, and visual storytelling, the performance immerses the audience in the myriad and complicated feelings of sexual love.  So now I have expressed that he is thine is a poetic display of passion, attraction, sensuality and ultimate heartbreak, played by beings created for this kind of high wire act, who Antonin Artaud calls “athletes of the heart.”  

July 26, 2021

Meetings and Interviews with the actors: University of Verona