Liberty

Synopsis

Paris, 1792. The French Revolution is four years old when ambitious young artist, Gamelin, discovers he has been made a magistrate for the ruling forces. Believing the Revolution divides the world between good and evil, he sees conspiracy and corruption everywhere. How strong will the ties of love and friendship prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, as the new order plunges with terrifying momentum from high idealism to bloody mob rule? Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France's 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif. Award-winning poet, playwright and novelist, Glyn Maxwell, brings a colloquial verse of great fluidity and immediacy to a story that is both fresh and relevant.

Our Review:

4 September 2008

If you really want to know what it’s like to feel trapped, not to say incarcerated, in a theatre, go see Liberty by Glyn Maxwell. It’s a punishing, mostly incomprehensible verse play about a group of revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror, based on a 1912 novel by Anatole France called Les Dieux sont Soif - and most of us felt sympathetically parched by the interval.

It manages to make one of the most exciting and dangerous periods in European history sound like a tea party in Theydon Bois. Which is more or less how the play begins: at a picnic in the countryside outside Paris in 1793, a few months after the execution of Louis XVI. Robespierre is in charge of a committee of public safety and Marie Antoinette is in prison.

Unfortunately, the struggling artist Evariste Gamelin (David Sturzaker) is not locked up with her, but free to bore us rigid with his take-away idealism and half-baked oratory. Gamelin becomes a repre...

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Latest User Review

Anthony Sycamore - 8 September 2008:

The depth and complexity of the verse has clearly demanded too much from your reviewer. The acting was superb, the audience was riveted and I shared the sense of being of being in the presence of a genius that sounded so old and was yet no new ......

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