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THE IDIOT COLONY
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Red Cape Theatre Company brings The Idiot Colony to Wyeside on Fri Nov 13 at 8pm. Red Cape is committed to telling stories that matter, move and entertain using visuals, physical storytelling and original writing. After over a year’s research into real-life events, The Idiot Colony was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2008.
The Idiot Colony tells the story of three women, who have spent decades wandering the wards and corridors of asylum. Locked away for their illicit loves, they relive their faltering memories through the haze of drugs, brutality and restraint. The Idiot Colony is a tragicomic exposé of the forced incarceration of young women in mental asylums during the 1940s and 1950s for crimes ranging from illegitimate pregnancy to lesbianism, anti-social behaviour, being the victims of abuse, and even for being considered ‘too promiscuous’ or ‘flirtatious’. An original new work of devised theatre, The Idiot Colony is a spectacular vision depicting human rights abuses not in some far off totalitarian state, but from recent history in our own backyard.
Based on real life accounts, the play tells the story of lives forever destroyed for the crime of falling in love with the wrong person. Detained, often on the orders of family members for the sake of saving grace from social scandal, some would stay within the Asylum for the rest of their lives. For the asylum’s inmates, the only respite is the hospital’s hairdressing salon. In this haven of intimacy, laughter and eighties’ pop songs, they find endings to the stories they have waited so long to tell.
Genuinely funny and moving, with beautiful visual imagery, The Idiot Colony is physically devised and performed by Fringe First award-winning actors Claire Coaché, Rebecca Loukes and Cassandra Friend; directed by award winning visual theatre artist Andrew Dawson; and written by Bafta and Rose D'or nominated Lisle Turner.
Factual background to The Idiot Colony.
Researched for over a year (interviewing staff and patients of mental hospitals all over England) the original inspiration for the play came from a story told by a hairdresser who worked in a salon inside a Midlands Mental Hospital in the 1980s. She talked about some of the elderly long-term female patients who were in the hospital because they had had illegitimate babies by American GIs. 50 years of institutionalisation, drug treatments, electric shock ‘therapies’ and in some cases neuro-surgery had left these women permanently altered. The women stayed within these hospitals until their closure during the late 1980s and early 1990s under the ‘Care in the Community Act’. A recent news story featured Jean Gambell, freed after 70 years in mental institutions, who died in October 2007. She had been wrongfully accused of stealing 2s 6d. The action of The Idiot Colony takes place inside the hairdressing salon of a mental institution.
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Friday, October 30, 2009 |
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