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YOUNG ACTORS AIM TO SURPRISE WITH A DREAM PLAY
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This week Gwent Young People’s Theatre offers a rare chance for local audiences to see a Strindberg play adapted by the UK’s most acclaimed woman playwright Caryl Churchill.
A Dream Play, will be performed this Thursday and Friday evenings, 17 and 18 May, (7.30pm) at the Melville Theatre, home of Gwent Theatre in the Drama Centre, Penypound, Abergavenny.
Written in 1901, the work is a forerunner of modern drama in which Strindberg attempted to imitate the logical form of a dream. This emphasis on subjectivity foreshadows Freud’s theories about the gap between the conscious and unconscious. Strindberg, who wrote more than 70 plays as well as novels and short stories, is credited with influencing dramatists Eugene O’Neill, Ionesco and Tennessee Williams as well as having an impact on British writers John Osborne and Harold Pinter.
In A Dream Play, a young woman comes from another world to see if life on earth is really as difficult as people make it out to be.
Strindberg says he wanted to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. ‘Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.’
The play will be performed by senior GYPT members. Director Chris Durnall says: “Just as in a dream, time and place are not important, characters merge, locations change, and a locked door becomes a recurrent image. The dream-like quality of the play is the essence. I think people will be surprised.”
Caryl Churchill’s spare and resonant version was first staged at the National Theatre in London. She says she was surprised by Strindberg’s tenderness and hadn’t realised how political he was and revered by trade unions for his defence of working people.
Tickets for the Melville Theatre (£6 and £4) can be obtained at the Borough Theatre Box Office, Abergavenny, tel 01873 850805.
More information at www.gwenttheatre.com. Tel 01873 853167.
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Monday, May 14, 2007 |
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