Work out what you want and go for it with all your conviction and don t care if you seem outrageous or stupid... All that s needed, in the end, is belief. Morning in London, Autumn 2011. Across the city, people wake up from an identical, terrifying dream. At the same moment, a young man named John returns home after years away to find economic gloom, ineffective protest, and a Prime Minister about to declare war. But John has a vision for the future and a way to make it happen. Coincidences, omens and visions collide with political reality in this epic new play from the writer of Earthquakes in London. Set in a dark and magical landscape, it depicts a London both familiar and strange, a London staring into the void. In a year which has seen governments fall as the people take to the streets, 13 explores the meaning of personal responsibility, the hold that the past has over the future and the nature of belief itself.
The Frontline by Che Walker
Saturday night outside the tube: God, strip bars, weed, crack, lost old men, unemployed actors and vegans all collide in a riptide of chaos on the streets of London. There's Beth the reformed Christian and Erkenwald the hot-dog seller, old Ragdale on a quest to find his daughter, actor-playwright and egomaniac Mordechai Thurrock, and Cockburn, Elliot and Clayton the dealers and junkies whose trade both sustains and destroys the lives of those around them.
In this vibrant and darkly comic new play, a dozen private stories emerge and their voices give utterance to a storm of subjects and feelings: pop culture and sexual fantasy, the ruins of empire and the delusions of religion, foreign oil and prehistoric London. A panorama of contemporary London encompassing the cruel and the tender, the gutter and the stars.
Che Walker's The Frontline premiered at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, in July 2008.
Our Country's Good By
Timberlake Wertenbaker
This play is based on fact. By the middle of the seventeenth century the middle class and wealthier citizens of England were deeply frightened of a rising crime rate - particularly crimes against property - which had been created by a swelling population and widespread unemployment. did not result in funding for such construction. The idea was proposed that convicts could be transported - exiled would be a more accurate term - to a remote part of the globe where the British where they could be used as free laborers to create a strategically located naval outpost: Australia.
When the first fleet arrived at this new penal colony, carrying the first Europeans who would live there, it is estimated that the Aboriginal population of the continent numbered about 300,000, that is roughly one person to every ten square miles. The Royal Marines who served as jailers resented being ordered to this ignoble duty in such an undeveloped part of the world. Their own diaries have shown historians that many of the captors took out their frustrations in brutal treatment of the prisoners. We also learn from these same sources that, in 1789, several of the convicts and one of the officers decided to put on a play for the enjoyment of the entire camp. None had any experience in the theatre, and only a few of the convicts could read, but, against all odds play on the Australian continent, but also in teaching themselves and their observers much about compassion, cooperation, and creativity.
Ms. Timberlake Wertenbaker, a playwright who gained much acclaim in the British theatre in the 1980’s, wrote this play after reading about the history of the convict transportation and this noteworthy amateur theatrical performance. It is her design, in Our Country’s Good, that the actors play both convicts and jailers -- a rich device that places on trial all of our assumptions about what “civilization” means. One critic “a tribute to the transforming power of drama.
This play is based on fact. By the middle of the seventeenth century the middle class and wealthier citizens of England were deeply frightened of a rising crime rate - particularly crimes against property - which had been created by a swelling population and widespread unemployment. did not result in funding for such construction. The idea was proposed that convicts could be transported - exiled would be a more accurate term - to a remote part of the globe where the British where they could be used as free laborers to create a strategically located naval outpost: Australia.
When the first fleet arrived at this new penal colony, carrying the first Europeans who would live there, it is estimated that the Aboriginal population of the continent numbered about 300,000, that is roughly one person to every ten square miles. The Royal Marines who served as jailers resented being ordered to this ignoble duty in such an undeveloped part of the world. Their own diaries have shown historians that many of the captors took out their frustrations in brutal treatment of the prisoners. We also learn from these same sources that, in 1789, several of the convicts and one of the officers decided to put on a play for the enjoyment of the entire camp. None had any experience in the theatre, and only a few of the convicts could read, but, against all odds play on the Australian continent, but also in teaching themselves and their observers much about compassion, cooperation, and creativity.
Ms. Timberlake Wertenbaker, a playwright who gained much acclaim in the British theatre in the 1980’s, wrote this play after reading about the history of the convict transportation and this noteworthy amateur theatrical performance. It is her design, in Our Country’s Good, that the actors play both convicts and jailers -- a rich device that places on trial all of our assumptions about what “civilization” means. One critic “a tribute to the transforming power of drama.
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