Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and Other Love Songs)

Author: Carl Grose
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783196556
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
Kneehigh Theatre Company presents Dead Dog in a Suitcase written by Carl Grose. What the HELL is the world coming to? Based on The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's classic musical satire, Dead Dog in a suitcase (and other love songs) is busting with wit, wonder and weirdness. An extraordinary Kneehigh cast of actor-musicians shoot, hoot and shimmy their way through this twisted morality tale of our times...by turns SHOCKING, HILARIOUS, HEARTFELT and ABSURD! Mayor Goodman has been assassinated. Contract killer Macheath has just married Pretty Polly Peachum and they plan to escape to a better world – but they aren't going anywhere. Not if pickled pilchard, hair gel and concrete tycoon Les Peachum and his wife have anything to do with it. See, they aren't happy with their daughter marrying Macheath. Not one bit. Before the day is out Macheath will face the hangman's noose and much more besides. All the while, the dogs are howling, the pier is creaking, the babes are crying, the concrete is cracking and the truth won't stay hidden for much longer... This is now, this is it The world is poor and man's a shit The game is rigged, nothing's truer Death's a joke and life a sewer!

The Global and Local Appeal of Kneehigh Theatre Company

Author: Catherine Trenchfield
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527586618
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
This book explores Kneehigh Theatre Company’s notions of “Brand Kneehigh”, discussing how their theatrical style enjoyed local and global appeal, in relation to theories of globalisation, localisation and cultural exchange. It defines Kneehigh’s theatrical brand, indicating Cornish cultural identity as a core component in conjunction with international influences. By looking at the history of this company, the book’s analysis of key productions reflects on qualities attributed to “Brand Kneehigh” and considers the ‘local’ and ‘global’ nature of their work. The selection and review of productions examined here reveals the changes and reinventions Kneehigh have undergone to incorporate shifting interests and socioeconomic engagements. This book explores Kneehigh’s ambitions to establish themselves as a company delivering material that is ‘popular’ in appeal, meeting the needs of a Cornish (local) community and an international (global) audience. However, tensions working between local and global interests are also exposed, with an investigation into Kneehigh’s own cited solution: their self-created performance space, the Asylum.

Our Lady of Blundellsands

Author: Jonathan Harvey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350181757
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
It's no secret that Sylvie is unravelling. Frozen in time in her Blundellsands house, she inhabits a fantasy world that never was. Garnet, her sister, is older and wiser – and wearier, with her shopping lists and tired love. She's always fanned the flames of Sylvie's fantasies. Because if she didn't... who knows where they'd both end up? But now the whole family's up in Liverpool for a birthday, and Garnet's got a secret of her own to pass on. There'll be a party... but it's not going to be pretty. Welcome to a family more messed up than your own.

Wise Children

Author: Angela Carter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786826925
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
In Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance – twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river – are celebrating their 75th birthday. Over the river in Chelsea, their father and greatest actor of his generation Melchior Hazard turns 100 on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he's still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all... Wise Children is adapted for the stage from Angela Carter's last novel about a theatrical family living in South London. It centres around twin chorus girls, Nora and Dora Chance, whose lives are brimming with mystery, illegitimacy and scandal. Dora narrates the story as her older self, looking back on a tumultuous life, throughout which she and her sister have loved to sing and dance. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope. Expect show girls and Shakespeare, sex and scandal, music, mischief and mistaken identity – and butterflies by the thousand.

The Seven Pomegranate Seeds

Author: Colin Teevan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350301175
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Book Description
Seven contemporary stories grounded in prominent, mythical origins. Persephone, Hypsipyle, Medea, Alcestis, Phaedra, Creusa and Demeter: the women of Euripides' plays are reimagined as people of today in an unexpected fusion of celebrity, inappropriate desires, historical police investigations and missing children. A severed maternal bond threads each story together, charting a journey through rage and redemption, towards a compelling conclusion. This revised edition of Colin Teevan's haunting monologue cycle was published to coincide with a new production at Rose Theatre, Kingston, in November 2021.

My People

Author: Caradoc Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286488
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
In a chapel service in rural Wales, all is not what it seems . . . A stage adaptation of one of the most celebrated and controversial short-story collections in the history of Anglo-Welsh literature. Originally published in 1915, the searing stories of My People – darkly comic, poignant, with flashes of savagery – exposed the hypocrisy and avarice nestling side-by-side in a Nonconformist community in the rural West Wales of the early 1900s. First produced n the centenary year of the publication of the original collection, this radical reimagining makes us question whether the events depicted in these remarkable stories are consigned to the past, or can we discern uncomfortable parallels in our modern life? This programme text edition was published to coincide with the world premiere of the stage adaptation on 5 November 2015 at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, in a co-production with Invertigo Theatre.

Ugly Chief

Author: Victoria Melody
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786823713
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
In 2013, Mike was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and given five years to live. Mike's daughter Victoria was put in charge of planning the funeral. But a year later the doctors realised they had misdiagnosed Mike. Victoria and Mike decided to go ahead with the funeral anyway and Victoria went to Port Talbot to train as a funeral director. Ugly Chief plays out the funeral Victoria planned, including her experieences of training at a funeral home Ugly Chief is a comic take on what we want and expect from a funerals and how the deceased might behave if they were actually there to see it. It also explores a father/daughter relationship, and "father and daughter reassess their relationship in the very act of making and performing the show" (The Guardian). The publication includes colour photographs from the premiere at Battersea Arts Centre and an interview with Victoria Melody.

This Island's Mine

Author: Philip Osment
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786827565
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
1988. THATCHER'S BRITAIN. Seventeen-year-old Luke runs away to London – away from homophobic playground slurs, headlines that scream 'Don't Teach Our Children To Be Gay' and a family who wouldn't understand him – to Uncle Martin, who he once saw with his arms around another man at a march. In the capital, Mark is sacked because of fears about colleagues working with 'someone like him'. His boyfriend, Selwyn, faces being beaten up both by the police and at home by his own stepbrother. Meanwhile, Debbie battles with her son, who doesn't want to live with her and her girlfriend. And retired piano teacher Miss Rosenblum – who once found refuge in this country from a terror that swept away half her family in 1930s Vienna – has seen this sort of hatred and fear before. Soon, these individual stories – of first loves and old flames, alliances and abandonment, missed opportunities and new chances – intertwine to paint a vivid picture of Eighties Britain. This Island's Mine was originally performed by Gay Sweatshop in 1988. Now, three decades after the introduction of Section 28 banning positive representations of homosexuality, Philip Osment's passionate and lyrical play, of outsiders, exiles and refugees, is all too resonant.

The Niceties

Author: Eleanor Burgess
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786829649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
At an elite East Coast university, an ambitious young black student and her esteemed white professor meet to discuss a paper the college junior is writing about the American Revolution. They're both liberal. They're both women. They're both brilliant. But very quickly, discussions of grammar and Google turn to race and reputation, and before they know it, they're in dangerous territory neither of them had foreseen – and facing stunning implications that can't be undone.

Ghost From A Perfect Place

Author: Philip Ridley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474227643
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
If you think I'm threatened by you, you're wrong. I'm Travis Flood. I was threatening people before you were born. Back in the sixties, Travis Flood and his gang terrorised Bethnal Green. Now, after an absence of 25 years, Travis returns and meets Rio, whose haunting beauty leads him to confront a story that bears no relation to his own distorted memory. And then there's the Cheerleaders . . . a present-day gang, more vicious and terrifying that anything Travis led in the past. This edition of Ghost from a Perfect Place was published to coincide with the first major revival of the play at the Arcola Theatre, London, in September 2014.