Out of Joint Announces Ambassadors Season
Date: 21 May 1999
Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint touring company has announced details for its West End season this autumn. The company will bring two premieres - including one by Mark Ravenhill - to the newly launched New Ambassadors Theatre for strictly limited runs of five weeks a piece.
Some Explicit Polaroids, the latest from Shopping and F***ing author Ravenhill, will open at the New Ambassadors on 6 September (previews from 1 September), following a regional tour and a stint at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. The satire on society's craving for scandal is set amongst international media magnates, celebrities and traders whose business is unrestrained by international boundaries. But the more they travel, the more the restaurants, hotels, airports and theme parks look the same. Some Explicit Polaroids runs until 9 October.
It's followed on 14 October (previews from 13 October) by Simon Bennett's black comedy Drummers which tells the story of two brothers who work as house-breakers, otherwise known as 'drummers'. Now that he's out of jail, Ray is determined to find out who stitched him up and settle the score. Drummers runs until 29 November.
Both productions are directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Stafford-Clark founded Out of Joint in 1993 with Sonia Friedman, now producer at the New Ambassadors, in order to generate new writing for the stage and to tour this work nationally and internationally. Since then, Out of Joint's multi award-winning productions have included Shopping and F***ing, Sue Townsend's The Queen and I, Caryl Churchill's Blue Heart, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good and Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo.
The Out of Joint residency is part of the New Ambassadors' inaugural season. The venue, which has been home to the displaced Royal Court Upstairs over the past 18 months, has recently relaunched as a commercial theatre with an emphasis on bringing new and alternative work into the West End.
