Rehearsal Room 14 Lifting the Lid

Three evenings...three different plays...three different experiences!

Thursday 13 November 8 pm
Everything I Do is a Love Letter to Life
Written and directed by Sally Hobson

This is a performance piece that has been in development for five years. The play is in some part directly inspired by the beautiful novella Silk by Alessandro Baricco and in other ways by the study of performance, belief systems and religious rituals. It explores the notion that illusion is inherent in the mind of the human being and that it is, in fact, essential and beautiful to the determining of the self. It is through the journeying of the individual that these misunderstandings and illusions can be explored. This very important journey can take place through travel and exploration upon the earth, but just as important within the very many dimensions of the internal worlds that reside deeply and lightly within each of us. The 19th century narrative of Silk sees Herve Joncour on a quest for love which takes him across the world to many different countries; this epic tale is interpolated with a very different 21st century love story.



Friday 14 November 8 pm
A Live Bird in the Mouth
by Jeanne-Mance Delisle
translated into Scots by Martin Bowman

Directed by Muriel Romanes
Assistant Director: Eleanor Rhode

"The writing of Jeanne-Mance Delisle shines with a terrible brightness, with a savage tone almost unique in our literature." Robert Levesque, Le Devoir

"...the characters of Jeanne-Mance Delisle, alive with animal drive and caught in the act of living their passions, are among the strongest in our literature." Stephane Lepine, Elle Quebec

"This play is still young. It sprang out of an interior clamour. After plenty of collisions and new beginnings, it succeeded in becoming a liberating incantation. It is a play which troubles and lays waste everything as does an unexpected storm. (It's really a gust of wind, with three swallows who do not understand the torment but who submit to it with their instinctive strength.)

Here is a violent love story where three would wish to solve the equation of two so that the two could become one; eternal quest, impossible androgyny, utopia without end rising like the bird of legend.

This play ought to be played like a blazing resurrection of the myth. It will not be without risk for the actors to undertake this story, relatively simple in its words, but complex in its definition, for it aroused different approaches in the course of its development. It is a play that would above all be dissatisfied with a literal interpretation. It permits, in fact it demands, transposition and metaphor.

The actors do not have any alternative but to question their own passions, their hearts beating wildly, without the possibility of help, and even less so because of the masks that the ritual will ask them to wear.

For the alchemy of the piece to work, the actors must be in a condition of confinement. The action occurs in an isolated place, far from the world of commercial spectacle or other places of seduction, and appropriate to the release of the fantasies and desires of each.

It's about a place with no exit, and when they have crossed the threshold, the characters, with their backs up against their truth, are confronted by the spell of the dramatic language.

The drama unfolds in a house built in the midst of the winds, the fascinating music of which eroticises the soul to the point of vertigo.

I dreamed of a play acted in darkness."

Jeanne-Mance Delisle



Saturday 15 November 8 pm
Age of Arousal
Written and directed by Linda Griffiths
Assistant Director: Catrin Evans

Linda Griffiths is one of Canada's legendary theatre creators. With Age of Arousal she has chosen to write about one of the greatest periods of change for women in the history of the western world.

1885: a time of great passion, great confusion. Mary Barfoot, an ex-militant suffragette, runs a school for secretaries with her beloved Rhoda. The school's invasion by three spinster sisters and a charismatic cad named Everard, creates a catalyst for political, sexual and emotional explosion. Ideas and libidos clash for dominance, as each character confronts the meaning of revolutionary courage. Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy and powerful ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self and is wildy based on George Gissing's 1893 novel The Odd Woman. Griffith describes what drew her to Gissing's book - "I found a battered paperback in a second-hand bookstore and bought it for a dollar. I'd never heard of George Gissing. I just turned the book over and the synopsis said 'Five Victorian Spinsters...'. I was sold." Sexy, fresh and vibrantly funny, Age of Arousal is a modern look at forbidden Victorian desires on the brink of explosion.