Exclusive: Print Room stages Eliot's Cocktail Party and Handspring's Ubu
The new season at The Print Room at the Coronet will feature a major revival of TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party, WhatsOnStage can reveal. Other highlights include the London transfer of Handspring's Ubu and the Truth Commission.
Directed by Abbey Wright (The Father), The Cocktail Party opens the autumn/winter season from 14 September to 10 October 2015.
Eliot's 1949 verse play centres on a recently estranged couple who hold a cocktail party. It was Eliot's most popular play in his lifetime, but has only been occasionally revived since. Casting for the Print Room production is still to be announced.
It will be the first dramatic work to play in the Coronet's main house, which was converted into a cinema in the early 20th century, for nearly 100 years.
It's followed in the main auditorium, from 15 October to 7 November, by Handspring Puppet Company's production of Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor, directed by artist William Kentridge.
The production, which sees Handspring's puppets perform poignant testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ran at the Edinburgh International Festival last year to mark the 20th anniversary of democracy in South Africa.
The cast includes original actors Busi Zokufa and Dawid Minnaar as Ma and Pa Ubu.
© Zadoc Nava
Continuing the Poetry @ the Print Room series, there will be three poetry evenings in the studio space on 13 October, 19 November and 15 December. Don Paterson will read on 15 December, with other poets to be announced.
From 11 to 18 November, in a co-production with the Institut Français, there will be a week-long presentation in the studio of Trois Ruptures / Three Splits, which premiered earlier this year at Chelsea Theatre.
The final production in the season, from 23 November to 12 December, will be Table of Delights, the 2013 show that sees the audience become diners in a theatrical restaurant. Presented as a co-production with Bristol's Theatre Damfino, it features recipes from food writer and chef Claire Thomson.
Commenting on Print Room's fourth season at the Coronet since relocating last year, artistic director Anda Winters said: "We are thrilled to offer this new season of fascinating and diverse work, including the first piece of dramatic theatre to happen in the beautiful main auditorium for 100 hundred years.
"We look forward to inviting our growing audiences to see more of the very best of today's live performance as we continue to breathe new life into this wonderful, historic building."
