ECC: Savage/Love & The Dumb Waiter (21-25 Sept ’10)
2010-2011
BATS: Don’t Dress For Dinner (9-10 Oct ’10)
“Hurtling along at the speed of light, this breathtaking farce is a near faultless piece of theatrical invention.” – London Guardian
“A nifty comedy about double adultery and gourmet cooking….” London Sunday Times
Bernard is planning a weekend with his mistress. He has hired a gourmet cook, is packing his wife Jacqueline off to her mother’s, and has invited his best friend, Robert, to provide an alibi. It is foolproof. What could possibly go wrong? Suppose Robert doesn’t know why he has been invited? Suppose Robert and Jacqueline are secret lovers? What happens if the cook is mistaken for the mistress and the mistress can’t cook? Mix these ingredients and you have the recipe for an evening of hilarious confusion…where nothing can go right!
STARRING: Peter Martin – Zena Waters – Adrian Veale Inge Hodl – Melanie Willow – Graham Duthie
Tickets: Adult €13 / Student €10
Website: http://www.batsantwerp.be
ATC: All My Sons (12-16 Oct 2010)
The ATC is pleased to announce
its first production for the new season,
a great American classic by Arthur Miller,
All My Sons
October 12 to 16, 2010 at 8pm
Bozar Studio theatre
While Joe Keller made a fortune during World War II, he is facing substantial personal losses. One son, Larry, remains missing and another, Chris, is lost
amongst his own thoughts about money, war and love. Meanwhile Mrs Keller is consumed by the longing for her son Larry’s return and battles to cope with the idea of Chris falling in love with his brother’s girl. This classic Arthur Miller drama from 1947 examines the dissonance between theAmerican Dream and the harsh realities of war and capitalism, a subject which is particularly worth reconsidering in the context of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The show, directed by Carrie Ellwanger, has an All-Star cast made up of both old and new ATC members.
Joe Keller – Ted Fletcher
Chris Keller – Christopher Flores
Kate Keller – Janet Wishnetsky
Ann Deever – Sarah Watts
George Deever – Daniel Prior
Sue Bayliss – Simone Ellul
Jim Bayliss – Charif Wehbe
Frank Lubey – Henri Colens
Lydia Lubey – Aoife O’Grady
ETC: Absurd, absurd! (12-16 Oct ’10)
Absurd, absurd!
12th-16th October at 20.00.
Studio Theatre, rue Waelhem 69a, 1030 Brussels
ETCetera’s next multilingual production after “Fin de Siècle” in 2009 is an evening of 3 plays dedicated to classic writers of the Absurd movement: unreal and real at the same time, and very funny.
Pic-Nic, by Fernando Arrabal in Spanish, is set in the First World War trenches; Victoria Station, by Harold Pinter in English, is about a London minicab “dispatcher” and his driver; while La Cantatrice Chauve, by Eugène Ionesco in French, is set in the English suburbs in the 1950’s.
Each will have “surtitles” in the other 2 languages.
The plays are directed by 3 of Brussels’ most experienced directors (see over), and include some very established actors such as Eduardo Aladro-Vico, Martin Whitworth, Christine Marchand, and Brian Holland.
Swan: Vincent River (29-30 Oct ’10)
Vincent River by Philip Ridley
A man. A woman. An empty room that soon will be filled with spilled secrets. And, oh yes, a convenient bottle of liquor to make the spilling easier. “Vincent River,” written in 2000 is almost doggedly naturalistic. It takes place in real time, in the present tense, in a recognizable London. Vincent River, starts deep and gets deeper, as both characters are peculiarly confessional right away. With no time for a gentle emotional warm-up, we struggle to immerse ourselves as fully as we would like in the repercussions of the murder of 33-year-old homosexual Vincent.
Hounded by the prejudiced taunts of the neighbours on her Bethnal Green estate, Vincent’s mother Anita has been forced to move to a new flat. Here she waits, in an almost furniture-free room, with only a bottle of gin for solace. Davey, who has long lurked outside, has finally been invited in. It was he who found Vincent’s body, he says, him and his fiancée.
The final destination of the piece is clear from 10 minutes in but as Ridley handles so adeptly the accretion of layers of detail, it makes the journey worth following. Moments of black humour and blacker horror sit side by side, as Davey offloads the knowledge that has been burdening him onto the one person who is desperate to hear. First staged 10 years ago at the Hampstead Theatre, London the themes of this play are, sadly, as resonant today as they were then.
‘Philip Ridley doesn’t write plays so much as dark hallucinations in which the world is skewed through his penetrating vision, so we look at it through new eyes… As the truth is exhumed and the dead seem to walk again there is a redemptive sense that it is through honesty in our personal relationships that absolution can be found.’ (The Guardian)
This is the latest in a series of great shows brought over from Bedford’s Swan Theatre Company in collaboration with the English Comedy Club.
