The Tamesis
All told, there were three workshops, followed by a six-week rehearsal period; Darcy and Menzies clicked from the start, “because I like to write with the actors in mind,” Zeldin explains. “This is a rich, special and unique process,” Menzies noted. “Immediately, it felt like a perfect union of brains. It was very exciting and emotional at times.”
An in-depth study of grief and the dynamics of relationships, interspersed with the haunting music of Yannis Philippakis of Foals, another place Explore classical Greek themes of honor, incest, and inheritance in a naturalistic capsule for a modern home. As in Oedipus— an adaptation of the show is also playing in New York this season — the desperate need for the truth to come out crushes all attempts to hide it. (In a sense, another place actually continues the story Oedipusbecause Antigone and her sister Ismene (reimagined here as Anne and Isi) are the daughters of Oedipus. )
For Darcy, part of the appeal of ancient Greek plays to contemporary audiences is “scale”: “I think it depends on their ability to maintain an emotional and psychological scale within a domestic space,” they say. “We’re at a point where it’s probably beyond the scale of a lot of theater productions that we’re seeing. People are looking for a different kind of scale.”
If there is something like that, they would appreciate it Dragon House It’s what drives people to interact with materials. “I love the workflow of this somewhat mysterious, often quite confusing thing called profiles, which allows young people to enter theater spaces where they can have experiences that may be different from many of their other experiences,” Darcy said. “It feels really promising. People forget that things can actually happen in theaters. I think that’s why younger audiences are really responding to this.”
Zeldin chimed in enthusiastically: “Yeah, it’s one of the few spaces we have where it’s really possible for something to happen that’s really unmediated.”
Menzies then took up the subject. “That’s why I think it’s increasingly important to resist the impact of Netflix on theater. Sometimes you go to theater and it’s trying to imitate those things. To me, that feels like an abdication of our responsibility in theater. We have to stand our ground and make it a space where people can come together to exchange old stories and great ideas, rather than letting it become a widget.”
Like Darcy, Menzies loved stage performance but also took his screen career seriously. He is best known for his role as Queen Elizabeth in “Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh” opposite Claire Foy. crown and come another place After starring as Edwin Stanton in this historical epic hunt. His most recent film role was playing a manipulative investor in Brad Pitt’s Grand Prix F1.
“One of the things I love about my job is that I get to change shapes in different rooms,” he laughs. “It’s really the same thing, but you just turn the knob to a different level and obviously it’s going to look very different.”
