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Goodman & Brodsky Quartet Share Performances

Double Olivier Award winner Henry Goodman (pictured) will star in the UK premiere production of award-winning Irish playwright Brian Friel’s new play, Performances, at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London, for a strictly limited season from 4 to 15 July 2006 (preview 3 July).

The play, directed by Lou Stein (artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin), explores celebrated 20th-century Czech composer Leos Janacek’s attitudes towards his art and personal life and looks at how a romantic obsession with a much younger married woman, Kamila Stosslova, produced his greatest music, including the string quartet Intimate Letters.

Goodman’s many London stage credits include The Birthday Party, Art, Guys and Dolls, Angels in America, Feelgood, Follies and Chicago as well as The Merchant of Venice and Assassins, both of which won him Oliviers. Most recently, he’s been seen in The Hypochondriac at the Almeida and The Exonerated at Riverside Studios. Later this year, he’ll play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in Sheffield later this year (See News, 17 May 2006). In Friel’s two-hander, Goodman is Janacek.

PhD student Anezka Ungrova arrives to interview Janacek at his home in Bruno, Moravia. She is convinced that his encounter with Kamila has had a great influence on his composition of Intimate Letters. Janacek denies any connection between the woman and his work. The stage is set for a tense, and sometimes comic, confrontation over the nature of his artistic inspiration and of his love for Kamila.

Friel’s other plays include The Home Place and Dancing at Lughansa. Performances features music by the Brodsky Quartet, an international chamber-music quartet which has been performing and recording since 1972. Brodsky Quartet was presented with a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for an outstanding contribution to the world of music in May 1998.

- by Caroline Ansdell

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