Tricycle Gets One Under, Fortune, Bloody SundayDate: 26 January 2005
North London’s Tricycle Theatre this week launches its spring 2005 season, which includes a UK premiere and three world premieres, including another in the theatre’s successful series of documentary-style stage dramas.
The season opens with English Touring Opera’s production of Mozart’s The (Little) Magic Flute, a mystical story of heroes, villains and damsels in distress. A specially prepared, UK premiere version of the opera has been arranged to make it accessible for both adults and children, featuring all the music from Mozart’s original. The production opens tonight (26 January 2005) and continues to 29 January.
The opera is followed, from 7 February to 5 March (previews from 3 March), by the world premiere of One Under, written by Winsome Pinnock, whose previous plays include Can You Keep a Secret? and Water, which premiered at the Tricycle in 2001. Tube driver Clyde gets drawn into a tunnel of despair when he experiences his first “one under” and attempts to understand the motives of his victim. The production is directed by Jennie Darnell and designed by Matthew Wright.
Another world premiere, The Fortune Club, runs at the Tricycle from 14 March to 2 April 2005 (previews from 10 March). In Dolly Dhingra’s play, a disillusioned group of friends meet in an East End bar on New Year’s Eve and hatch a plan to make their fortunes, which catapults them into a world of greed, glamour and deceit. The play, inspired by a true crime, is directed by Kully Thiarai and produced in association with the Leicester Haymarket, where it will also be presented later in the year.
The investigation into the Bloody Sunday shootings is dramatised in Bloody Sunday - Scenes from the Saville Inquiry. On Sunday 30 January 1972, 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and another 13 were injured when British soldiers opened fire during an anti-internment civil rights march in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The original inquiry in 1972 by Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, was branded the “Widgery Whitewash” by many who were unhappy with the findings.
The Saville Inquiry was opened in 1998 as part of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Over the past six years, it has heard evidence from over 1,000 witnesses. The play, written by the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor and directed by Tricycle artistic director Nicolas Kent, explores what really happened through witness accounts. It will be performed at the Tricycle from 7 April.
Bloody Sunday follows the Tricycle’s ‘war on terror’ trial pieces Justifying War (based on the Hutton Enquiry) and the Whatsonstage.com Award-nominated Guantanamo (gathered from interviews with detainees), which transferred to the West End and Broadway. Earlier Tricycle dramatisations have brought to the stage the Nuremberg trials, the Scott Arms to Iraq Inquiry, the Hague hearings on the Srebrenica massacre and the Stephen Lawrence murder trial, which also transferred to the West End and toured the UK.
- by Caroline Ansdell & Terri Paddock
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