WYP releases Spring/Summer season programme
December 5, 2008
The West Yorkshire Playhouse released its programme for the 2009 Spring/Summer season on Wednesday. Commenting on the approach that he and general director Sheena Wrigley took in assembling it, WYP artistic director Ian Brown stressed the need to give members of the public compelling incentives to spend their money on theatregoing in the prevailing economic circumstances. He also highlighted the fact that the programme will maintain many of the WYP’s established relationships with other companies and theatres, and its loyalty to its traditional aim of supporting theatre of especial northern interest, particularly by staging pieces by northern writers.
The first major production of the season, Dawn Walton’s The Hounding of David Oluwale (31 January – 21 February), will go a long way toward this end. An adaptation of Kester Aspden’s novel by Oladipo Agboluaje, the Eclipse Theatre production chronicles the demise of a Nigerian immigrant who came to Leeds in the hope of beginning a career in engineering in 1949, but whose savaged body was discovered in the River Aire twenty years later. The subsequent internal police inquiry uncovered near-systematic violence and culminated in the imprisonment of two officers. After its stint at the Playhouse, the play will travel to Birmingham Repertory Theatre (25 - 28 February), Liverpool Playhouse (3 - 7 March) The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich (11 - 14 March) and Hackney Empire (24 - 28 March).
The Hounding of David Oluwale will be followed by the WYP and Northern Broadsides production of Othello (14 February – 14 March). This will be comic Lenny Henry’s stage debut, and is to be directed by Broadsides founder and artistic director Barrie Rutter. Henry has been keen to stress that, although he hopes that his popularity will allow the production to appeal beyond the traditional theatregoing demographic, it will not overlook any of the play’s complexities. He has claimed that Broadsides is an eminently appropriate company for this purpose, since its performers “seem to have proper voices – they speak like people I recognise”. Henry will be joined by Conrad Nelson as Iago and Jessica Harris as Desdemona. After a month at the WYP, Othello will begin a national tour comprising performances at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre (17 – 21 March), Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre (7 – 11 April), Bath’s Theatre Royal (14 – 18 April), Kingston’s The Rose (21 – 25 April) and The New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme (21 April – 2 May), before finishing at The Viaduct, in the company’s hometown of Halifax (5 – 9 May).
April at the Playhouse will be dominated by WYP and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse joint production of JB Priestley’s When We Are Married (4 – 25 April). Set in the West Riding in 1908, this comedy depicts a gathering of three couples to congratulate each another on reaching their respective twenty-first anniversaries that soon starts to diverge from its envisaged course. The production is to be directed by Brown, who also directed Eden End for the WYP’s JB Priestley season in 2001, and designed by Colin Richmond, who worked on previous WYP productions Hapgood and Animal Farm.
The WYP’s strong relationship with Birmingham Repertory Theatre will be maintained through performances of the first part of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in summer (28 May – 20 June). This tale, originally spread across three novels, follows Lyra, a girl from the Oxford of a world like our own, and Will, a boy from our world, on a journey originally meant to end with them finding Lyra’s missing friend Rodger. However, it becomes an adventure through such differing territories as the indefatigably academic Oxford, the forbidding Arctic and eventually the Land of the Dead, as Lyra and Will try to avoid the callous Mrs Coulter. The first production of Wright’s adaptation, at the National Theatre in 2004, achieved great success. The WYP and BRT one is to be directed by BRT artistic director Rachel Kavanaugh, who will be working with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe designer Ruari Murchison. It will make extensive use of puppetry and lavish sets to try to evoke the scenes in the books.
Summer will also see Tamara Harvey’s production of early Sir Alan Ayckbourn piece Bedroom Farce. Written in 1975, this comedy about married life takes place in an evening in which three bedrooms are divided between four couples. 2009 is likely to be seen as a fitting year in which to produce Ayckbourn’s early work, as he is to leave his position as artistic director of Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre after performances of his new work Awaking Beauty, a collaboration with composer Denis King, finish in January.
As in previous years, the 2009 Northern Exposure season will aim to support new or little-known playwriting talents by staging their work. This year it will consist of performances of Dom Grace and Boff Whalley’s It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow and Tom Wells’ Me, as a Penguin. There shall, of course, also be many touring productions in addition to the core productions. These will be Out of Joint and Sydney Theatre Company’s The Convict’s Opera (24 – 28 February); Foursight Theatre’s Can Any Mother Help Me? (3 – 7 March); Headlong’s Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness (10 – 14 March); Kneehigh Theatre’s Don John (in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bristol Old Vic, 18 – 28 March); Kali Theatre’s Another Paradise (19 – 21 March); Graeae Theatre Company’s Whiter Than Snow (in association with Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 24 – 28 March); Improbable’s Panic (1 – 9 April); Crying Out Loud’s Circo de la Sombra (15 – 18 April); Imitating the Dog and Pete Brooks’ Kellerman (22 – 25 April); The North East Theatre Consortium’s Queen Bee (5 – 6 May); and Unlimited Theatre’s The Moon The Moon (in association with Curve, Leicester, 13 – 16 May).
It has also been announced that the West Yorkshire Playhouse Touring Company will tour schools with new work Sharp. This is made up of three short plays examining the issues associated with knife crime for secondary school pupils. Director Gail McIntyre’s trio of collaborations, with writers Dom Grace, Jodie Marshall and Michelle Scally Clarke, will tour Leeds in autumn and summer, with each performance being accompanied by a workshop scrutinising the damage that knife crime inflicts on communities.
-Simon Walker
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