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Dateline: 23rd July, 2004
RSC Presents World Premiere of 17th Century Play The final play in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Spanish Golden Age season is Pedro, the Great Pretender, by Miguel Cervantes. It will be the very first professionally staged version of the play to be produced anywhere in the world. According to available records, it was never even staged in 17th century Spain. Several academics have also rated it as his most interesting play – predicting that it would be challenging to stage because of its episodic form, without the usual intertwining and dénouement of sequential main and sub-plots. It has also been suggested that Cervantes wrote this, his final play (written between 1613 and 1615) as an original work of experimental theatre.
Cervantes is perhaps better known as a novelist and creator of Don Quixote. The play tells the story of Pedro, a loveable trickster, rogue and adventurer (played by John Ramm) who aims to be helpful to everyone in order to be popular and liked. His witty and entrepreneurial journey leads him to question who he is and to find his own identity – until he finally finds his true vocation on the stage.
Cervantes was himself a wanderer, dogged by poverty and personal humiliations. Born in 1547, he had no formal education and enlisted in the Spanish Army in 1569. Once he had completed his service he set out for Spain, but he was captured by pirates and held captive by the Turks in Algiers. After five years his family paid his ransom and he finally returned to Spain where he tried to break into the theatre. In 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, eighteen years his junior and the daughter of a well-to-do peasant. By the late 1580s he had left her and, in 1587, his continuing poverty forced him to become a tax collector. During this period he was imprisoned two or three times because of discrepancies with his accounts. After 1590, Cervantes lived in Seville and then Madrid where he stayed until his death in 1616 (on the same day that Shakespeare died). As well as Don Quixote, Cervantes is renowned as the first Spanish writer to compose short stories and for his ability to write humour and social satire.
Mike Alfreds makes his directorial debut for the RSC with this production. He has teamed up with long term collaborator Philip Osment as translator. He founded Shared Experience in 1975 and ran it until 1987. He was Associate Director at the Royal National Theatre between 1985 and 1988, and Artistic Director of Cambridge Theatre Company, renamed Method & Madness, from 1991 to 1999.
Philip Osment studied languages at Oxford University, and worked as an actor, director and writer. He was Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop and and has directed at the National Theatre and Bristol Old Vic. Today he most regularly works as a dramaturg, and tends to aim his writing at young audiences through companies such as Red Ladder.
John Ramm, probably best known as one half of the comic duo, the National Theatre of Brent, is joined by the rest of the Spanish Golden Age ensemble for this production: Claire Cox, Rebecca Johnson, Katherine Kelly, Melanie MacHugh, Emma Pallant, Joanna van Kampen, William Buckhurst, James Chalmers, Joseph Chance, Julius D’Silva, Joseph Millson, Vinta Morgan, Oscar Pearce, Matt Ryan, Peter Sproule, John Stahl, Simon Trinder, John Wark and Oliver Williams. Pedro, The Great Pretender previews from 1st September and opens on Thursday 9th September, 7pm, at the Swan Theatre.
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