Volcano Theatre Company

we have 27 plays by Volcano Theatre Company in our database . Click on the name of the play to read reviews we have in our database.

• UNKNOWN PLEASURES: The Elsinore Project [ 2010]
  author: unknown
  synopsis:
  UNKNOWN PLEASURES, an innovative partnership between Volcano Theatre Company, Taliesin Arts Centre and Swansea Metropolitan University which brings together Wales's finest artists and its best emerging talents to create adventurous new work. This years project is a devised piece taking inspiration from films of David Lynch, the work of Heiner Muller and different Hamlet's from David Tenant to Ethan Hawkes.
  
  
• A few little drops [ 2007]
  author: ?
  synopsis:
  In the Summer of 2007, Volcano will celebrate and explore the world's most important substance with an extraordinary performance in a strange and beautiful space.   A FEW LITTLE DROPS will imagine water as it is worshipped, polluted, frozen, melted, cherished, wasted, dribbled, drunk, desecrated, poisoned, carried, spilt or stolen. Water in all its abundance and scarcity; its awesome elemental power and its fragile simplicity. We will invite you to contemplate myths, theories, facts, catastrophes and beautiful objects; to hear the bizarre percussion of a cooling glacier and meet the strange people who sing to ice crystals.   A Few Little Drops will be made possible by an Arts Ouside Cardiff award from the Arts Council of Wales, and will be produced in partnership with five major Welsh theatres. It will take place in mysterious watery spaces at five locations around Wales. To make this all as exciting as possible we'll be joining forces with some remarkable and diverse talents including artist TIM DAVIES, poet ROBERT MINHINNICK, video activists UNDERCURRENTS and the award-winning SCIENCE MADE SIMPLE. We found all this talent without even crossing the Severn Bridge, but lest we're in danger of going all parochial, we have cast our net wider across the whole of Great Britainland for six extraordinary performers, whose names will be revealed in due course...
  
  
• ROMEO & JULIET (An independent inquiry) [ 2004]
  author: based on Shakespeare
  synopsis:
  The company is currently planning an unusual new version of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, to tour the UK in the Autumn. Known previously for deconstructive adaptations of the Sonnets and Macbeth, Volcano now turns its attention to this sprawling and unruly romantic tragedy. Although (rightly) thought of as a love story, Romeo & Juliet is also a story set within the context of a long and bitter feud - a Hate Story. Volcano will present a contemporary hate/love story, drawing parallels with latter-day ill-fated lovers and the squabbling of powerful interests over their not-so-private affairs. Shakespeare's language in Romeo & Juliet is at its most diverse. Volcano's Romeo & Juliet will follow and extend these innovations, exploiting language in all its diversity: it will be funny, crude, dangerous, banal, sublime and beautiful, devastating and deceitful. An excessive, experimental show with video, kissing and fighting.
  
  
• Welshing [ 2004]
  author: Dic Edwards
  synopsis:
  Welshing is a new play about the plight of Middle Management in Wales, by controversial Welsh playwright Dic Edwards. If all goes according to plan, we will workshop Welshing later this year, and this will culminate in a new production. Dic's recent work includes the libretto of an extraordinary opera entitled Manifest Destiny, the story of a would-be suicide bomber who wants to avenge her Palestinian father's death but ends up in US custody at Guantanamo Bay. Find out more at www.dic-edwards.com.
  
  
• Confessions [ 2002]
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  Volcano Theatre Company has been working on a performance project with third-year degree students from Swansea Institute's Theatre Studies Course. Confessions is the outcome of an intensive weeklong exploratory workshop and creative journey at Swansea Museum. Eight women move through the rooms of the museum, looking through the exhibits, piecing together elements of their own history. Their pasts are invented; their memories are constructed. Amongst the relics each finds her own story and looks for a witness to be present at the telling. Confessions was presented twice daily at 12 noon and 3pm from Tuesday 10 to Saturday 14 December 2002 at Swansea Museum. Each presentation ran for roughly 30 minutes Volcano Theatre Company in association with Swansea Museum and Swansea Institute of Higher Education. It was supported by the City and County of Swansea Environment and Art Festival, and was made possible by an "Arts for All" lottery grant from the Arts Council of Wales.
  
  
• Talk Sex Show [ 2002]
  author: Paul Davies
  synopsis:
  A charismatic new age sex therapist addresses a rapt audience: "Man and woman are unable to love and make love". He is going to tell his audience how the divine garden of woman and the sensitive organ of man can re-discover their original cosmic rapture. A sex manual for the 21st century Based on ancient teaching, a contemporary guru instructs us in the art of lovemaking. A lecture presentation using slides, Latin, anatomical drawings, video and real actors. At last, Volcano presents a spiritual approach to the art and act of sex. TalkSexShow will be compulsive viewing for couples, singles, the emotionally disorientated and anyone who has ever wanted to wear a raincoat.
  
  
• Unfinished Business [ 2002]
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  At Swansea Museum, August 2002
  
  
• Private Lives [ 2001]
  author: Noel Coward
  synopsis:
  A radical and very physical re-working of this am-dram staple; guarenteed to irritate the middle classes
  
  
• Destination [ 2001]
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  Directed by Kathryn Hunter Translated & Co-directed by Jan Willem Van Den Bosch Design Liz Cooke Music Patrick Fitzgerald Production Manager Rachel Shipp Cast Burn Gorman | Matilda Leyser | Fern Smith Destination is a compelling account of power and oppression explored through the relationship of a domineering mother and her reticent daughter. They have grown up in the shadow of a once thriving but now crumbling foundry. The annual escape from this industrial graveyard to their summer sea-side retreat is thrown into turmoil when a young and brilliant avant-garde playwright is invited to join them. The guilt-ridden mother struggles to find meaning from her past and to embrace the possibility of change and revolution in the future, whatever the outcome or cost. A tense and blackly comic evening where pain and humour, cynicism and optimism, nihilism and faith battle for supremacy in this British premiere of Bernhard's brilliantly driven play. Destination is a new translation by Jan Villem van den Bosch of Am Ziel, one of Thomas Bernhard's most poignant and comic plays. Born in Holland in 1931, Bernhard who lived all of his life in Austria, is one of the most important and original voices of modern European theatre. His dark absurdist plays can be likened to those of Beckett and Pinter. He is, however, virtually unknown in Britain since very few of his eighteen full-length stage plays have been translated into English. He is an exuberant and prolific novelist poet and playwright with a uniquely lyrical and bilious writing style. His darkly comic, anarchic voice speaks through his extraordinary characters and his plays present an eccentric picture of humanity and the modern world, preoccupied as he is with such cultural and political concerns as authority, appearance and reality.
  
  
• Torsk [ 2000]
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  "Torsk" concerns the at once vivid and petrified imaginative life of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, and explores that life through a myriad of media
  
  
• Macbeth, The Director's Cut [ 2000]
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  synopsis:
  A thrilling requiem duet as we follow Macbeth the Butcher and his Fiend-like Queen as they descend further into the slaughterhouse of their own madness. Directed by choreographer / performer Nigel Charnock (who also directed L.O.V.E. based on Shakespeare's sonnets) with original music by Stewart Lucas and set and lighting by Andrew Jones.
  
  
• Moments of Madness [ 1999]
  author: Paul Davies
  synopsis:
  Part parody, part tragedy, absurd and very funny Moments of Madness is a fictional conference concerned with the affairs of an emerging nation at the dawn of a new era. Moments of Madness presents us with five characters; a lost executive, cornered consultant, small-time actor, failed academic and ecstatic spin-doctor meet to discuss art, culture and the state. All proceeds according to plan until a stranger arrives and time itself begins to slip out of grasp. Bells are rung, reality collapses… Moments of Madness draws its inspiration from the creators of "anti-theatre" especially the Romanian/French writer Eugene Ionesco and his notions of theatre as the revelation of the monstrous and the communication of incommunicable realities. The show is directed by Fern Smith with choreography by Helen Bailey of Ersatz Dance and design by Andrew Jones.
  
  
• Time of My Life [ 1998]
  author: Alan Ayckbourn (via Volcano)
  synopsis:
  Directed by Paul Davies Choreography Helen Bailey and James Hewison Cast: Fern Smith, Hywel Morgan, Suzanne Cave, Michael Geary, Belinda Low and Brendan Gregory. Toured throughout Wales Time Of My Life is the first in a series of Volcano Classic Productions, designed to stage exquisite, high quality and downright entertaining versions of some of Britain's most popular dramas. Alan Ayckbourn has been described in many ways: as the natural successor to Noel Coward, Scarborough's lbsen, the best comic dramatist since Moliere and even as our finest feminist writer. What is certain is that Ayckbourn is one of Britain's best loved and prolific playwrights, translated into forty languages and performed in virtually every continent of the globe. He is a master of comic timing, visual theatre, awesome characterisation and painful circumstance. He is a constant theatrical innovator and a writer whose trademark is increasingly the ability to tread a delicate tightrope between humour and despair. Time Of My Life is vintage Ayckbourn, dealing with the all too familiar theme of the decline and fall of a successful family business and the ensuing financial and emotional troubles this brings. It is Laura Stratton's fifty-fourth birthday and a small family celebration has been organised by her husband Gerry at their favourite restaurant. All seems quiet on the domestic front, however in Ayckbourn country wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of family togetherness ... then the trouble begins..
  
  
• Time of My Life [ 1998]
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• After the Orgy [ 1998]
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  After the Orgy is a Wagnerian joy-ride, an urban disaster, an hysterically happy love story. Adam & Eve are re-born into the midnight hour of the Twentieth century… Is this garden of Unearthy Delights a Post-Modern Paradise or Pre-Millenium Hell? After the Orgy is a live & loud thrash band, video, a 120 bpm go-go dancer and two seriously talented performers bored but gored on success. Fast, flashy, fun and very loud, After the Orgy is a wildly extravagant multi-media event. 'A brilliantly challenging deconstruction -The Guardian 'Sheer excess -The Independent 'Pornography for Intellectuals -The Bishop of Galway
  
  
• The Town that Went Mad [ 1997]
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  Based loosly on 'Under Milk Wood'
  
  
• The Town That Went Mad [ 1997]
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  A sequel to Dylan Thomas' UNDER MILK WOOD Directed by Paul Davies, Fern Smith and Andrew Jones This show began as a collaboration with three Albanian actors from Macedonia , and was first performed at a heritage centre on the Gower Peninsula in West Wales in the Summer of1995. A year later it was re-directed as one possible interpretation of Under Milk Wood by Branko Brezovec of Croatia; and was performed at Swansea's Grand Theatre before embarking on a short tour of the U.K. and Germany in the Autumn of 1996. Due to copyright difficulties it became impossible for to adapt the work of Dylan Thomas in the manner that had been originally conceived. In our original production, we had chosen Thomas' projected extension of the "night scene" as the central theme of Milk Wood. The tensions between the romanticism of the community and the rationality of society may well have been one of the most potent issues within the life and work of Dylan Thomas and it remains a tension central to our production. In THE TOWN THAT WENT MAD we have used the lyrical words of Wordsworth and Blake, the critical modern eye of Gwyn Thomas, the sharp tongue of Caradog Evans and the bitter mind of Fredrich Nietszche. All other words are written by Paul Davies. THE TOWN THAT WENT MAD was premiered in In March 1997, where it played to packed houses at large-scale venues in Romania; including the prestigious Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest, the National Theatre in Timisoara and the National Theatre of Craiova. The production was also presented at London's South Bank Centre and in October 1999 at the Homus Novus Festival in Riga.
  
  
• Vagina Dentata [ 1995]
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• Manifesto [ 1994]
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  Directed by Janek Alexander in collaboration with the company with additional choreography by Nigel Charnock Cast - Paul Davies, Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett, Jan Knightly, Fern Smith, Simon Thorp and Charlotte Vincent and later re-worked with Juan Carrascoso, Denise Evans, Michele Gomez and Fabrice Guillon. Toured throughout the U.K This production is based on the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with additional text by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Arthur Koestler. Manifesto reassesses the world-shattering significance of communism, utilising an ensemble of six actors the production draws inspiration and influences from the early Russian avant-garde theatre
  
  
• How to Live [ 1994]
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  Directed by Nigel Charnock Cast - Jane Arnfield, Paul Davies, Richard Davies & Fern Smit then reworked to include Gillian Lyon and Sam Knight. Toured throughout the U.K and internationally to France, Hong Kong, France, Macedonia, Montenegro & Serbia. A fusion of Henrik Ibsen's most poetic and provocative works which celebrates the extraordinary creativity of his dramatic method. The play treads the knife edge between farce and tragedy, which is undoubtedly the hallmark of Ibsen, rightly remembered as the grandfather of modern theatre. The piece seamlessly merges the sordid biographical details of the performers' real life fantasies with scenes of almost operatic intensity from climactic moments of Ibsen's greatest dramas.
  
  
• L.O.V.E. [ 1992]
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  Directed by Nigel Charnock Cast - Paul Davies, Fern Smith, Liam Steel and then later reworked with James Hewison. Toured throughout the U.K and to Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Italy, Macedonia, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Spain Based on Shakespeare's Sonnets. A manifesto of passion, spirit, desperation, and lust. This production won a 1993 Time Out Theatre Award. In 1993, the company also won the first BBC Wales Arts Award.
  
  
• V [ 1991]
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  An adaptation of Tony Harrison's controversial poem. An exposition of culture, class, nationalism, rootlessness, belonging and the violence of youth.
  
  
• Medea Sexwar [ 1991]
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  Adapted from Tony Harrison's opera and the S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto by Valerie Solanis. Depicts Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece and his subsequent doomed relationship with the Barbarian Princess Medea, and features an anarchist-feminist "Greek Chorus". Won a 1992 Manchester Evening News Award.
  
  
• Magbeth [ 1989]
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  Adapted from Marks & Gran/Guardian Comic Strip and Shakespeare to "celebrate" a decade of Thatcherism. Made in Budva, former Yugoslavia.
  
  
• Tell-tale Heart [ 1988]
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  By Edgar Allan Poe. A classic tale of terror, guilt and paranoia.
  
  
• Greek [ 1988]
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  Berkoff's adaptation of the Oedipus Myth. Toured to East and West Germany.
  
  
• From my Point of View [ 1988]
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  An adaptation of Steven Berkoff's short story on the subject of loneliness, sex and the single woman.