projects

 

This summer's project: Lady Anne Clifford - A Woman Cast Out.

A play about her dramatic and long-drawn out fight to regain her inheritance - the castles, the barony and the sherriffwick (the original spelling) of Westmorland.

Her enemies - The men: King James 1st, her uncle and her cousin Henry, her brother-in-law, her husband's 'favourite', her husband (when he wasn't her lover). Her friends - The women (mostly, but also her cousin Francis) : the Queen, her mother her sisters-in-law and the other ladies of the Court.

Kendal Community Theatre and director Chris Taylor take it off the page in ways that sometimes surprise, but always entertain, me. The costumes by Kate Reid are as near authentic as they can be (can the women run and play Barley Break in them? can the men grow beards?). The music, from MD Debby Howrie, is absolutely authentic (with some interesting inversions). The set design? I wait to see. It'll certainly be claustrophobic, possibly also louring.

An Unholy Alliance 2015

Set in the Town Hall Court, immersive theatre following machinations and rivalry of the Sanhedrin, the Herodians and the scribes as they plot to apprehend and kill Jesus. Some remarkable performances from the cast and the audience as they become involved in the cobra-type emergency meeting with mob rule impending in Passover filled Jerusalem.