Marianne Faithfull
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Faithfull Takes to Stage as Barbican's Black Rider

Sixties icon Marianne Faithfull (pictured) will take to the theatrical stage this spring for the first time in more than three decades. At the Barbican Theatre, from 17 May to 12 June 2004, the legendary singer and actress will star in The Black Rider, the first English-language staging of the 1991 German piece and the first production produced solely by the City-based arts complex as part of its ongoing BITE (Barbican International Theatre Events) season.

Faithfull will play the devilish Pegleg, the ‘black rider’ of the title, in the piece about a clerk who makes a Faustian pact and accepts magic bullets in order to win the heart of his beloved in a shooting contest.

Based on the original story that inspired Weber’s 19th-century opera Der Frieschutze, The Black Rider was originally produced in German in 1991, a unique collaboration which united renowned theatre director Robert Wilson, who has also designed and lit the production, with composer Tom Waits and Beat writer William Burroughs.

Faithfull shot to music fame in 1964, aged 17, with the release of “As Tears Go By”, the first song written by the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Since then, she has produced more than 20 albums, with her latest, The Poison, due out in September 2004.

Though best known as a singer, Faithfull has also regularly pursued an acting career. In the 1960s, she appeared on the London stage with Glenda Jackson in Three Sisters and with Anthony Hopkins in Hamlet. Her film appearances have included Girl on a Motorcycle, The Turn of the Screw, Intimacy and Far from China.

- by Terri Paddock

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