James Dacre, new artistic director of Northampton’s Royal and Derngate, has announced details of his first Made in Northampton season of productions for 2014, which contains six new commissions.
They include both original plays and adaptations, with the theatre staging “old stories in powerful new ways and telling stories that have never been told before”.
On the Royal stage, the season starts with A Tale of Two Cities, with Mike Poulton transforming Charles Dickens’s work into a theatrical event set to original music by Oscar-winning composer Rachel Portman.
James Dacre directs, with design by Mike Britton. A company of ten will perform alongside a large ensemble drawn from the local community to capture the turbulence, anarchy and romance of London and Paris during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution. It runs from Friday 21 February until Saturday 15 March.
Tamsin Oglesby looks at infidelity and marriage in her adaptation of Georges Feydeau’s Every Last Trick.
Paul Hunter directs the play, which unites the comic talents of theatre companies Spymonkey and Told By An Idiot for the first time in the production which runs from Friday 18 April until Saturday 10 May.
As Britain commemorates the centenary of the start of the World War I, Nicholas Wright adapts Pat Barker’s Booker-nominated novel Regeneration.
Set in Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland in 1917, the play follows poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon who has been incarcerated in an attempt to undermine his public disapproval of the war.
A co-production with Touring Consortium Theatre Company, Regeneration plays at the Northampton venue from Friday 29 August until Saturday 20 September before going on a nationwide tour.
Dacre will direct Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer prize-winning Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in autumn 2014, a co-production with Northern Stage, Newcastle and Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. It runs from Wednesday 1 until Saturday 18 October.
The Christmas 2014 production on the Royal stage will be Merlin, which runs from Wednesday 26 November until Sunday 4 January.
Royal and Derngate will also be producing two shows in the theatre’s Underground Studio as part of the 2014 season.
In a co-production with London’s Gate Theatre, James Dacre will direct The Body of an American, which unites the experiences of Canadian Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer Paul Watson and American poet Dan O’Brien. It runs from Thursday 27 February until Saturday 8 March.
Tove Jansson’s much-loved Moomins will come to life in Moominsummer Madness which finds the Moomins aboard a floating theatre after a huge flood sweeps through their valley. The production will be in the Underground Studio from Thursday 22 May until Sunday 1 June.
The venue has also announced the introduction of the Royal and Derngate and HighTide Award to commission a play which examines life outside our major cities—an original piece which explores and has its roots in the towns and rural communities that make up the majority of the population.
After a full development process the winning script will be co-produced by Royal and Derngate and HighTide Festival.