LITMIR.BIZ

The farm was there, wasn’t going anywhere. It was solid, physical. Flagstones. Timber. Place housed the hopes and fears of hundreds of people, and I cast it to one side, just like that, because I was blindsided. All I needed to do was stand firm like the rest. Break heart, drop blood, done. Always take a breath Jim. Always take a breath. On a remote livery yard in rural England, Jim arrives ‘home’ after six years away, in need of work. It didn’t end so well last time, but he’s sure that this time it’ll be different… Sam, as old as the fixtures and fittings themselves, reluctantly agrees – there’s work to be done after all. As the men attempt to pick up from where they left off, fresh cracks appear beside old wounds. Things have changed. But the world can only be held at bay for so long before the two men will have to answer for their actions. A terse and delicate dissection of male emotions from a rural perspective: fathers and sons, honour and legacy, molasses and mud.

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A baby cries. A bottle breaks. A window smashes. Over the course of one night, a man and a woman try to still their screaming infant – but as the hours grow longer, the world becomes elastic around them, and the horrors that scar our planet crash into the baby’s room. Should they ever have brought this child into such a wounded world? In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) takes a hallucinatory look at one couple’s experience of having their first baby.

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Howard Barker’s form of tragedy – his Theatre of Catastrophe – is a speculation on the way individuals dislocated by social or personal crises make meaning from their pain, sometimes willing their own extinction, sometimes altering the terms on which they might continue to exist. Their actions are not judged and no attempt is made to influence or console. In Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews , a gifted musician is banished to the remotest region of an empire by an autocrat he had complacently regarded as a patron and a friend. A moral and intellectual duel is played out over the distance of a thousand miles. In the Depths of Dead Love is set in a feudal China. A similarly exiled man scrapes a living by renting out his peculiar property – a bottomless well – to aspiring suicides. Among these is a married couple who exert an appalling influence over him. As in all great tragedy, an uncomfortable vein of comedy runs through the work, not to relieve but to intensify its contradictions… In the Cloth Cathedral describes the rise of an assassin, the killer of an archbishop who he condemns for preaching religion without God. His prosecutor, a brilliant but tormented lawyer, finds himself seduced by the integrity of the criminal’s character, ending up as his accomplice. One of the finest discordant duets in Barker’s work, the warring protagonists are surrounded by a chorus of the vengeful, the forgiving, and the dead… More No Still is set in yet deeper chaos. The female protagonist Sway takes refuge from the nausea of debate by substituting practised poses for articulated speech. In her search for a model society, she is accompanied by an escaped criminal with whom she finds a city of rampant roses and draconian laws. She falls in love for the first time – not with the city’s governor, a reactionary priest – but with his infant self who exists simultaneously and in the same dimension. Barker’s capacity for meditation and the most daring theatrical imagination are here combined with particular intensity.

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Two boys are playing a game. They fight, they laugh, they jump up and down, they play dead. Downstairs, their parents – Medea and Jason – are arguing. As the shouting gets louder, their bedroom will no longer be able to protect them from the violence of the outside world. Their iconic fate, at the hands of their mother, will ensure that they enter mythology as two of the most tragic siblings of all time. Medea is presented in association with Belvoir, Sydney and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks whose original production of the play was highly critically acclaimed. The production turns Euripides’ classic tale on its head – presenting the tragedy from the children’s perspective.

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“A gorgeous, witty and elegant re-interpretation of our national treasure, Nell Gwyn. This new comedy is set in her Pall Mall parlour, in 1685, where the ‘Protestant Whore’ paces, laments, and panics at the impending death of Charles II, her lover and patron. Destitution beckons after a lifetime ‘applying her genius to delighting the king.’ Nell’s crisis is shadowed by her faithful, wry, maidservant Margery, whose own story is a secret narrative of popular but defeated republicanism. She’s no whore, but another survivor of bloody tumult whose fate is likewise hoist on the life and death of a patriarch. We see Nell in breeches, a perfect boy, we hear her sing like an angel; Margery dances, empties chamber pots, and delivers both companionship and commentary on revolution, restoration, lust, love, sex, class, and power. Written with a richness of language that captures the bawdy wit of the Restoration stage, interwoven with Henry Purcell’s haunting songs of the English Baroque, this play is a fine vignette of Britain then and now in which the personal is heroically, hilariously political.” Beatrix Campbell OBE

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Anthony Clark’s award-winning adaptation of Albert Lamorisse’s Fifties French film, The Red Balloon , follows the adventures of a lonely Parisian boy and a stray balloon which befriends him. It enjoyed a successful run at the National Theatre in 1996.

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How many policemen does it take to cause the death of 1,000 people in custody? Apparently none. Justice is blind, but how deaf is it? Silent Cry , by Madani Younis, unashamedly tackles the issues that face a family that verge on imploding, and tells the story of a mother's journey that begins as her son's life ends. A death in police custody leads to an ordinary family looking for justice from a system that has no answers. The story is based on true documented evidence and interviews. Each performance is followed by an after show discussion with the writer/director and cast. This is a bold piece with innovative use of music and movement, creating spectacularly gripping theatre. Silent Cry was produced by The Asian Theatre School and Red Ladder Theatre.

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…you'll see them stuck like insects in amber. Like an Ibsen play… haunted for the rest of their lives.' Life After Scandal takes you behind the closed curtains and beyond the reach of the telephoto lenses to explore our paparazzi-infested world from the other side, as those implicated in some of the most notorious scandals of recent years talk frankly about the events which transformed their lives. This verbatim play from the writer of Talking To Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook uses the subjects’ own words to take an entertaining, compassionate and deeply moving look at the different people, from scorned politicians to powerful PRs, expensive prostitutes to disgraced aristocrats, who find themselves caught up in the modern machinery of scandal. Life After Scandal opened at the Hampstead Theatre in September 2007.

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Bill is sustained by his deep sense of a wider culture and an improving world. The only thing the human race needs to do is learn. When he meets a person who embodies this idea, he naturally likes them. Especially if his wife doesn't. Set at the end of the 1950s, Scenes from the Back of Beyond explores the comfort, hopes and fragility of family life in a new Sydney suburb. A production opened at the Royal Court Theatre, London in November 2006.

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