Off-West End Announcements – 20 Feb 2010

An
Olympian Effort At Arcola

The Arts versus
Sports debate rages on ahead of the 2012 Olympics. Just don’t make playwright
and former international athletics coach Tom McNab pick a side. His new play 1936, depicting the lead up
to the Berlin Olympics of the same year, runs at the Arcola Studio from
6-24 April, produced by ATTIC Theatre and directed by Jenny Lee. A nine strong cast takes to the stage for this timely
reminder of the politics that lie behind every Olympic Games.

Room
With A Different View

Victoria’s Above
the Stag Theatre comes over all Merchant and Ivory next month, with a new
production of E.M. Forster’s Maurice from 2-28 March. Written
in 1914, Forster’s tale of a young Edwardian man who falls for a fellow
undergraduate at Cambridge was not published until 1971, and later became a
film starring Hugh Grant as Maurice’s love interest. Tim McArthur directs this revival,
adapted for the stage by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham.

Carry On
Classical At Cock

While the Cock
Tavern continues to pull in the evening crowds with its popular staging of

La Bohѐme, the Kilburn venue entertains another classical composer in its new
matinee production. James Sheldon’s A Model for Mankind is
based on the life and times of Dmitri Shostakovich, and his complex relationship
with the Soviet Russian regime. Blanche
McIntyre, formerly in residence at the National and Finborough, directs the run
from 27 March -17 April.

And
Finally…

Theatre 503 takes
a look back at the past ten years this week with
Decade, a series of ten shorts plays assessing how life has
changed since the new Millennium chimed in. The theatre’s resident 503Five
writers – recipients of the venue’s first ever commissioning awards – join forces
with April de Angelis, David Eldridge, Fraser Grace, Phil Porter and Amy
Rosenthal for this retrospective view of the noughties, each night putting a
new year in context.