AVENGING ANGELS ONLINE PLAY-READINGS
Following the success of our first season of online play-readings, Changing Times, J. Productions, Milan, is delighted to host this new season entitled Avenging Angels.
The season features plays by British playwrights JB Priestley and Peter Shaffer, Russian dramatist Nikolai Gogol, Bulgarian satirist Stanislav Stratiev, Milanese theatrical legend Dario Fo and our own resident playwright Justin Butcher, who curates this season, in partnership with Julia Holden.
“The writing on the wall, the finger of doom, the day of reckoning, the sword of Damocles …
All through human history, our stories, our songs, our dramas and our religious narratives have been shot through with this central preoccupation: that one day, come what may, an avenging angel will come to shine a light on the darkness of corruption, to speak truth to power, to reveal all that has lain hidden.
From the Old Testament prophets to the seers of the Greek myths, from the mediaeval morality plays to figures such as the Commendatore in Don Giovanni or the Button Moulder in Peer Gynt, avenging angels populate our most enduring cultural narratives, bringing the judgement we yearn for and fear in equal measure”
Justin Butcher
If you are interested in participating either as a listener or as a reader please send an email to info@jproductions.it
The last two plays in this current series have been postponed to the Autumn. Please join us for The Roman Bath and The Weapons Inspector Calls in the Autumn. Dates to be announced in September.
An Inspector Calls
by J.B. PRIESTLEY
Priestley’s play, in which a police inspector knocks at the door of the smug Birling famiy as they celebrate the engagement of their daughter, shows how each of the Birlings are implicated in the death of a young woman.
It is a vivid and expressionistic piece of meta-theatre and revels in the frolicsome games with time and metaphysics that Priestley enjoyed playing in his work.
The play is set in 1912, just as the First World War, which would put an end to a whole comfortable middle-class way of life, is looming. But it was written in 1945, at the end of a Second World War that seemed likely to usher in another new era of social and cultural change. It offers a passionate plea for a more just and compassionate society.
LYN GARDNER, The Guardian
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
The Government Inspector
by NIKOLAI GOGOL
The Government Inspector premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, in Saint Petersburg, in 1836.
A lowly civil servant from Saint Petersburg, Hlestakov, visits a small provincial town, where he’s mistaken for a high-ranking government inspector. The town’s governor and leading officials are terrified lest the extent of their corruption is revealed. Hlestakov exploits the misunderstanding for all it is worth, spinning grandiose tales of his exalted political life while accepting generous bribes from the town officials.
A satirical laceration of the corruption and bureaucracy of Russian government under the tsar, it can be summed up, famously, as the town governor at last turns on the audience to yell, “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!”
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
Lettice & Lovage
by PETER SHAFFER
Lettice Duffet, an expert on Elizabethan cuisine and medieval weaponry, is an indefatigable but daffy enthusiast of history and the theatre. As a tour guide at Fustian House, one of the least stately of London’s stately homes, she theatrically embellishes its historical past, ultimately coming up on the radar of Lotte Schoen, an inspector from the Preservation Trust. Neither impressed nor entertained by Lettice’s freewheeling history lessons, Schoen fires her. Not one however, to go without a fight, Lettice engages the stoic, conventional Lotte in battle to the death of all that is sacred to the Empire and the crown …
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
Accidental Death of an Anarchist
by DARIO FO
Translated by Ed Emery
Accidental Death derives from the case of Giuseppe Pinelli, a Milanese railway worker who in 1969 was picked up by the police, accused of the Piazza Fontana Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura bombing and who “fell” out of a fourth-floor window at police HQ (later he was finally absolved from any responsibility for the bombing). Staged not long after Pinelli’s death, the play shows a revolutionary Pimpernel infiltrating the Milan police office, masquerading as an examining magistrate who has come to re-open the case and driving a coach and horses through the official versions of how the anarchist-suspect came to end up as “jam sponge”.
… [In] Fo’s hair’s-breadth combination of political exposé and pungent vaudeville … the evening remains a splendid reminder that when broad farce and social protest combine, the offspring is a real cracker.’
MICHAEL BILLINGTON, The Guardian
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
The Roman Bath
by STANISLAV STRATIEV
Translated by Justin Butcher
‘How do dramatists defy tyranny? One answer, in communist eastern Europe, was to write absurdist comedy. And, to the names of Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel and Poland’s Sławomir Mro˙zek, one can now add Bulgaria’s Stanislav Stratiev whose 1974 play is getting its belated British premiere in a sparky new version by Justin Butcher. It makes for a buoyant evening that displays the satiric strengths … of the absurdist genre.
The play starts from a simple premise: an historic Roman bath is found under the floorboards of an archetypal “little man”, Ivan Antonov. The discovery, however, brings the innocent Ivan nothing but trouble as his flat is invaded by a succession of predatory visitors. A careerist academic turns the apartment into an excavation site. And he is quickly followed by a dodgy entrepreneur, a state-sanctioned lifeguard, a greedy property developer and a party hack who dreams of creating a swimming pool for the local communist cell. Everyone seeks to exploit the treasure trove, while ignoring Ivan’s basic human needs.
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
A Weapons Inspector Calls
by JUSTIN BUTCHER
‘Justin Butcher scored the surprise hit of the year with The Madness of George Dubya. Now he repeats the format by using JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls as the basis for attacking the Iraq war … On the eve of Bush’s re-election, a weapons inspector named Dan Styx turns up at the White House to indict the pro-war faction. Dubya emerges as a bumbling idiot who, told that the war has cost $20bn a month, mutters, “Is that good?” Tony Blair is a shafted patsy who has endorsed the war in exchange for a promised Palestinian homeland …
Where Priestley’s Inspector Goole is a strange mix of cop and moral conscience, Butcher’s Styx is more like an avenging angel … Butcher lands blow after blow … [assembling] the facts to prove that military intervention was long-planned and that “the inspectors were a preliminary to war, not a prevention”.
Wittily performed by Andrew Harrison as a dyslexic Dubya, Mark Heenehan as the inspector and Alasdair Craig as a guileless Blair, the show confirms Butcher’s rare talent for blending moral anger with brute farce.’
MICHAEL BILLINGTON, The Guardian
If you would like to participate as a listener or reader please email info@jproductions.it
If you would like to support this project please donate HERE
