Birmingham theatre company Stan's Café will commemorate 100 years since the death of French composer Erik Satie with an evening celebrating his life and work.
Satie 100 will feature a revival of Memoirs of an Amnesiac, which Stan’s Cafe first performed in 1992. A “strange, dark and funny biographical play about obsession, delusion, identity and hero worship”, Memoirs of an Amnesiac finds eccentric loner Eric Smith guiding imaginary visitors around his bedsit Satie museum and narrating fake film footage of his hero. But then the boundaries between Smith's interior world and the walls of his room start to become increasingly blurred and the questioning voices in his head become more difficult to ignore.
The revival of Memoirs of an Amnesiac reunites the production's original cast of actor Graeme Rose and musician Richard Chew. It will be accompanied by recitals of Satie’s piano music played by a range of pianists.
James Yarker, director and co-founder of Stan’s Cafe, said, “the piece will be a time capsule, going back to our younger selves, early '90s Birmingham and a pre-digital age. A whole strand of the show is about trying to connect with unobtainable people, so this attempt at time travel will be especially poignant and powerful.”
Co-founder Graeme Rose added, “Memoirs of an Amnesiac was the first piece of theatre I fell in love with. It got under my skin and I adored it. Of course, it helped that others liked it too but I knew that whatever the reaction was we’d made something very beautiful; I knew without a shadow of a doubt coming off stage that we’d nailed it."
Satie 100 will be performed on Saturday 5 July at Stan's Cafe's base, Our Facility, in Birmingham.