Seven plays on the subject of Thebes presented in succession? Don't they know that the ancient world is not relevant these days? No, but seriously, what an ambitious project! [Globe and Mail]
Ned Dickens has been working on his first play for, oh, about 15 years now.
Of course, when Dickens turned from acting to play writing as his
eyesight failed in 1994, he wasn't planning on creating what may be the
largest theatrical project in Canadian history.
Back then, he was simply commissioned to pen a new version of Seneca's
Oedipus – an appropriate tale of blindness, both literal and figurative, for an artist suffering from advanced glaucoma.
But after tackling the story of the king who gouges his eyes out for
Toronto's Die in Debt company – and winning a Dora Award for it –
Dickens became interested in expanding his vision to further consider
Jocasta, the mother Oedipus loved too much. Then, he became curious
about the aftermath of Oedipus's downfall.
Six years later, Dickens's
Oedipus had turned into a trilogy. And then he realized what he really wanted to dramatize was the entire history of Thebes.
City of Wine – which recounts the 150-year lifespan of the
ancient city from conception to destruction in seven plays and 14 hours
– finally gets its full public premiere this week in Toronto. The whole
cycle of seven plays will be performed twice, starting today.
It's a fittingly cathartic moment for Dickens after a decade and a half
of writing, subsidized by work ranging from teaching to stone masonry.
“It's a pretty wonderful feeling,” he says over the phone from his home in Kingston. “Not everyone gets a magnum opus.
...
City of Wine's two performance cycles at Theatre Passe
Muraille this week are part of an unprecedented collaboration between
seven of Canada's top acting programs from Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver to Sir Wilfred Grenfell College at Memorial University in
Corner Brook.
Each school has produced one of the cycle's chapters as a final-year project – in chronological order, they are
Harmonia,
Pentheus,
Laius,
Jocasta,
Oedipus,
Creon and
Seven – and they are bringing them together for the first time in Toronto.
While developing
City of Wine, Nightswimming's artistic
director Brian Quirt realized that partnering with theatre schools was
the only way the play cycle could be affordably workshopped.
“The primary goal of the marathon is to allow us and an audience to see
the seven plays in sequence, see how they weave together,” says Quirt,
who also worked as dramaturge on Dickens's original
Oepidus and thus has spent a third of his 45 years working on this project.
...Theatres certainly
seem to have an unending passion for the myths of Thebes. Sophocles
wrote the most famous plays about the city –
Antigone,
Oedipus Rex and
Oedipus at Colonus
– and other playwrights, including Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Athol
Fugard and Wajdi Mouawad, to name a handful, have been inspired
millennia afterwards.
Dickens's cycle isn't simply an adaptation of these older works. Though
based on the original myths, it goes off on its own course and fills in
the blanks about the city's most famous inhabitants, from founder
Cadmus and his goddess-turned-mortal wife Harmonia onwards.
...
Notably Dickens has ditched the Greek chorus for seven individuals who
reappear in different guises in each of the plays. These archetypal
characters don't have names, but are identified by the props they carry
when they first appear in
Oedipus: Bowl, Blood, Glass, Bread, Cloth, Firewood and Water.
The central protagonist of
City of Wine, however, is Thebes itself.
It's primarily the story of the life and death of a great city.
...
The City of Wine performances start today [4 May 2009] at 4 p.m. and run until Saturday evening at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille (
www.nightswimmingtheatre.com ).