Theatre by the Lake in Keswick is to stage nine of its own productions in 2014—ranging from a Shakespeare play to the world première of a new warm-hearted comedy.
In the main house for spring is Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. The story follows seven-year-old Michael and his aunts in rural Donegal in 1936; just as their lives are about to change forever.
The spring production in the studio is Stephen MacDonald’s Not About Heroes, a play about the meeting of poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the friendship forged between them.
This play is the theatre’s contribution to the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Following its run in the studio the production will tour to rural venues in Cumbria.
Besides these two home produced shows, from January to May the theatre will host a variety of visiting companies, including the return of The Reduced Shakespeare Company, Opera Della Luna with The Mikado and Keswick Amateur Operatic Society with Singin’ in the Rain.
The festivals also return, with the Film Festival in February, Jennings Keswick Jazz Festival and the Mountain Festival in May and Words by the Water in March.
The theatre’s summer season of six plays begins with Ben Travers’s farce Rookery Nook, featuring a rogues’ gallery of comic creations, including the formidable busybody pairing of Gertrude Twine and housekeeper Mrs Leverett.
Second up is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Scottish playwright and poet Liz Lochhead. Next up is the theatre’s first production of a Shakespeare play since A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009, The Comedy of Errors.
The first summer production in the studio will be The Winterling. This play by Jez Butterworth, author of Jerusalem and Mojo, is a blackly comic thriller following the fate of an exiled gangster as he waits for his associates in an abandoned Derbyshire farmhouse.
This is followed by the world première of Seeing the Lights, commissioned by Theatre by the Lake from Lancashire-born playwright Brendan Murray. This comedy is funny and sad in equal measure, tackling topical and family issues with sympathy and humour.
Rounding off the season is Old Times, Harold Pinter’s gripping play about memory, jealousy and sexual possession. The summer season runs from May 24 to November 8.
The Christmas production, Peter Pan, will run from November 29 to January 31.