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Caligula performed in Wales with supporting cast of senior citizens |
This April, theatre company August 012 will bring Albert Camus’s play (in a translation by David Greig) about tyrannical Roman Emperor Caligula to Wales. Directed by Mathilde Lopez (Serious Money, Pornography), Caligula will run at Chapter 10-20 April. Caligula has been missing for three days and now he seems to have lost his mind. Once charismatic, now just another megalomaniac - obsessive, tyrannical, yet still strangely handsome. He executes citizens for entertainment. He takes unforgivable risks with the economy. He has just made his favourite horse senator. And now he wants the impossible. He wants the moon. The senators are used to capricious emperors but this one really has gone too far. Something must be done. Maybe after tea. In this absurd tragicomedy Albert Camus, one of the most significant writers and philosophers of the 20th Century, explores our fascination with excess and our thirst for the absolute. In this production, Caligula is re-imagined in the celebrity driven world of Chavez, Berlusconi, Gaddafi and Hello magazine. This modern masterpiece is performed for the first time in Wales with an all male cast (Christopher Elson, John Norton, Adam Redmore, Nathan Sussex and Hugh Thomas) who are supported by senior citizens from Ely, Fairwater and Grangetown. Director Mathilde Lopez comments: “In these times of tired democracies and global failures, we are all un-avowedly dreaming of a hero, a powerful figurehead that will make us believe, or just dream. Caligula, like Colonel Gaddafi in the ‘80s or the late Hugo Chavez, is an emblematic figure of resistance and freedom, and his obsessions and eccentricities are pure, naïve, seductive and dangerous. Once praised liberators, pop stars of the political world, we then dismiss, judge them and abandon them to their (media) deaths with equal fervour years later. More over, the inclusion of senior citizens who play Rome’s aging senate, injects a visceral sense of reality, an apparent comfort and proximity constantly challenged throughout the play as our senators grow from docile to Machiavellian, ultimately assassinating the Emperor. It has been a joy to work with Age Concern and other senior citizen organisations. The participants’ sense of fun, their freedom and the chance to hear this growing part of our society's voice, playfulness, knowledge and see their pride in owning the work has been a breath of fresh air.” Caligula runs between 10 and 20 April (no Sundays) at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from Chapter’s Box Office on 029 2030 4400 or www.chapter.org |
| web site: www.chapter.org |
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Tuesday, March 19, 2013 |
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