Age of Arousal - 18th Feb to 12th Mar 2011 - More Information
Age of Arousal
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and then touring
18th Feb to 12th Mar 2011
UK Premiere
AGE OF AROUSAL
by Linda Griffiths
A co-production with the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
directed by Muriel Romanes
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.
In November 2007 I was invited to attend a production of Age of Arousal by Nightwood Theatre, Toronto in collaboration with Factory Theatre. Nightwood have a very similar ethos to that of Stellar Quines and I was thrilled by this play and especially as it is now a century since the suffragette movement came into being. The play is about women who challenge convention and women who dare to say the "unsayable" and is in the spirit of the work we do at Stellar Quines. A very successful public reading of the play was peformed as part of our Rehearsal Room project in 2008 at the Tron Theatre and was directed by the writer Linda Griffiths.
Muriel Romanes
THE PLAY
It is a time of great passion - and of great confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire.
Ex-militant suffragette Mary Barfoot and her devoted protegee and lover Rhoda enlist female students to master the new invention that will gain them freedom - the typewriter. Three spinster sisters are invited into the school to rescue them from poverty, setting in motion an odyssey of alcoholism, cross-dressing and sexual revolution. Enter Everard Barfoot, Mary's cousin, an ex-doctor in his thirties, about to embark on a life of leisure, and suddenly all the characters are erupting with discoveries, contradictions and personal epiphanies.
Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy and powerful ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self. Wildly inspired by The Odd Women, a Victorian novel by George Gissing, it is less "a historical play, more a fantasia - where everyone is on the brink of tumultuous change, sexual and lubricious, explosive and contradictory." (Linda Griffiths, playwright.)
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