Live at 40

Published: 10 January 2013
Reporter: Peter Lathan

Newcastle’s Live Theatre will be 40 years old in 2013 and will celebrate with its usual mix of new writing, a revival and tour of one of its most successful shows, work with children and young people and visiting productions, plus a specially created promenade production/theatre tour/party, a new Friends scheme and the opening of a newly refurbished building as a home for creative businesses.

The first production of the February/May season will be the northern premiere of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour (21st February to 17th March), a play which requires no director, set or even preparation. It uses a different performer for each performance and that performer does not see the script until just before going on stage.

Live is taking the opportunity to invite a different actor, writer or comedian who has worked with the company in the past to give one performance. Among those so far confirmed are actors Chris Connel, Charlie Hardwick, John Hodgkinson, Hywell Morgan, Laura Norton and Stephen Tompkinson, writers Stella Duffy and Shelagh Stephenson, and comedian Sarah Millican.

Middlesbrough-born writer Alistair McDowell has two plays in the season: Captain Amazing, one of the winners of the Live/Empty Space Bursary for 2012, runs from 9th to 13th April and his Bruntwood Prize winning play, Brilliant Adventures, a co-production with the Manchester Royal Exchange, runs from 29th May to 15th June.

14th to 25th May sees Live Witness, developed and directed by Unfolding Theatre’s Annie Rigby and Amy Golding of Theatre Auracaria, which is based on stories and memories of the theatre and will be a promenade performance all around the theatre.

And there’s an interesting departure for the theatre: a tour of schools with a play written by a 12 year old. Chelsey Cleminson wrote Michaela’s Mistake as part of the theatre’s Write Stuff and has now been expanded and developed for a wider schools’ audience. It will also be performed in the Studio from 11th to 13th April.

Live’s most successful ever production, Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters which premiered in 2007, played three times at the National, did two national tours and went to Broadway and the West End, will be revived. Again in a Bill Kenwright production, for a third national tour.

In addition there will be visits by other companies, the usual Scratch Night and the theatre will also be presenting Live ARCADE in which Stockton’s ARC in which four pieces of new work (one each month) will be performed for the Newcastle audience.

Introducing the fortieth anniversary, artistic director Max Roberts said that Live Theatre has survived because its provides a platform for issues which affect the lives of local people and for people who “are put into this world to sing, to dance, to act and the write, to be creative. And we believe passionately in that.”

Live also has a passionate commitment, he went on, to the region in which we live and work, to its people and its rich culture and heritage.

The theatre will be supported during the year by the Port of Tyne

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