Saturday, 14 June 2008

*** "the revenger's tragedy" (directed by melly still)

friday 13th june 2008

"the revenger's tragedy"
by thomas middleton
Director: Melly Still
Designers: Ti Green and Melly Still

Lighting Designer: Paul Anderson
Music: Adrian Sutton and Different Gear
Sound Designer: Paul Arditti
Movement Director: Rick Nodine
Fight Director: Paul Benzing


olivier, national theatre
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/revengerstragedy






Loud instant start and immediately we are immersed in this bacchanalian world of sex and drama and violence and intrigue and masks and corridors and duplicity and amorality

Total commitment by all the cast makes this world completely believable

The revolve presents and represents the 3 sets and skids us between them - often whirling us round like a carousel

The music is a brilliant mash of live mixed house and classical seared thru with the cut glass beauty of a counter tenor

Dark colours -reds and blacks. Masks. Change of a wig to make a disguise

Great dance sequences

Almost filmic altho' always utterly theatrical


A huge hit for us all and for C and S particularly

'Think Sarah Kane, early Edward Bond, with Mark Ravenhill thrown in, and you’re close to defining the imaginative punch of Melly Still’s modern-dress revival…’ The Times
'Bloody dance of sex and death strikes all the right notes’ Evening Standard
‘Club music, gothic interiors, sarcastic humour and some heavy daubs of gore….an insistent coup de theatre.’ Daily Mail


Attend me, I am past my depth in lust And I must swim or drown.
As he holds the skull of his beloved – who rejected the licentious old duke’s advances and so was poisoned – Vindice plots the Duke’s grotesque murder. But in a court where adultery, rape and incest are the norm, his vengeance does not stop there. An orgy of ritualistic, even playful, bloodletting follows.

Were’t not for gold and women there would be no damnation.
The Revenger's Tragedy is a ferociously dark play by Thomas Middleton, set in an avaricious world that seethes with vice and retribution.

Following his Olivier award-winning performance in The Man of Mode, Rory Kinnear returns to play Vindice.
Featuring live music from DJs differentGear

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