Rehearsal Room 8

Rehearsal Room is a creative way for Stellar Quines Theatre Company to uncover new plays and new voices in partnership with our audience. We continue to be curious, looking for new and exciting ways of stimulating the hearts and minds of our audience and we are committed to involving you in the process of making theatre.

Wednesday, 3 November 2004 7.30pm

Folie à Trois by Sarah Wooley

Directed by Gaynor Macfarlane, in collaboration with BBC Radio 4

Three women live together in an ordinary suburban street in the West of Scotland. After a chance encounter with a street evangelist, the three decide to make a suicide pact rather than face the 21st century and the threat of imminent apocalypse. But how will they do it and what happens if one of them changes her mind? They also decide to keep the curtains open in case they miss the spectacle of cosmic disintegration.

A truthful and darkly funny play about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Thursday, 4 November 2004 7.30pm
Double Bill

i Speak as Will hear me by Eliza Langland

Directed by Eliza Langland and David Goodall, multi-media collaborator

Shakespeare wrote live theatre about live issues for a live audience. This project takes radical academic research on Mary Queen of Scots and William Shakespeare and gives it to actors and audience, live and interactive, with actual documents and research material on display, put to immediate use, beyond conjecture, in the immediacy of the theatre experience.

Extracts of the multi media script in preparation will be workshopped and read with as much visual and sound back-up as practicable.


Silk by Alessandro Baricco, adapted by Sally Hobson

Directed by Sally Hobson

Silk is a very touching tale about the paradox of human love and suffering. This moving story, adapted from Alessandro Barrico’s novella, Silk, tells us about the desire that drives Herve Joncours towards unconquerable love. His travels during the 1860’s take him to faraway places in the world and within himself. This is a tale about illusion and desire and a very uncommon love.


Friday, 5 November 7.30pm

Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, adapted by Judith Adams

Directed by Muriel Romanes and Jemima Levick, in creative collaboration with 59 Ltd.

We enter the May of Teck Club in Knightsbridge between VE and VJ day, 1945. It is a hostel for the pecuniary convenience and social protection of young women obliged to work in London, and the men passing through its doors are transported by the lives of these ravishing creatures. But there is a dark secret buried within their charming world, and, poised between the twin towers of poetry and passion, between love and money, innocence and corruption, humour and horror, Spark’s explosive drama shatters the delicate glass of gender illusion.

‘…few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.’


Saturday, 6 November 7.30pm
Double Bill

Showcase of a two-week workshop with Oleg Kisseliov of French Canadian company Creations Diving Horse

Stellar Quines is building relationships with innovative practitioners who push the boundaries of performance. Our collaboration with Créations Diving Horse delivered two weeks of workshops with professional actors, directors and students bringing international influences to Scottish theatre practice. This evening is an opportunity to share the progress made by the Scottish performers and directors in this innovative collaboration.

The Unconquered by Torben Betts

Directed by Muriel Romanes

The Unconquered, by acclaimed and controversial playwright Torben Betts, is a brutally comic theatrical speculation: what would happen if, by the will of the people, the UK became a socialist republic overnight, true democracy implemented and the old order held to account for its crimes?

As the Great Empire begins its relentless bombing campaign in an attempt to restore the status quo, this savage contemporary satire focuses on the struggle of a fiercely militant schoolgirl who becomes embroiled in the ensuing civil war.

‘Betts is an uncommonly talented playwright’, Time Out

TWO WEEKS WORKSHOPS
25 October – 6 November 2004

Stellar Quines is building relationships with innovative practitioners who push the boundaries of performance. Our collaboration with Les Créations Diving Horse delivered two weeks of workshops with professional actors, directors and students bringing international and innovative influences to Scottish theatre practice.

The workshops applied Oleg Kisseliov’s ‘Creative Impulse’ technique, which values the personalities unique to the acting profession and seeks to establish a verbal structure of the author’s ideas through improvisation of the text.