in Sea Creatures
at the Hampstead Theatre, London 2023
Photo by Marc Brenner
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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The curtain rises on the kitchen of a cottage by the sea, where the sounds of the sea and the weather wash over the room. Four women live in this cottage: the mother Shirley, her partner, Sarah, and two of Shirley’s daughters, George and Toni, who expect their sister, Robin, to arrive shortly with her boyfriend, Mark. But Mark appears unexpectedly without Robin, saying that she has gone missing and hasn’t been heard from for a week. Apparently, this is not unusual, because Robin has always been troubled and taken off without notice. Mark seeks refuge with the family and waits helplessly for Robin to arrive. But Robin doesn’t come, and Mark and the women must learn to live with her absence.
This is Cordelia Lynn’s atmospheric new play, Sea Creatures, which as we recorded this episode is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald. The play is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and the shore rich in metaphoric resonances.
I have admired Cordelia Lynn’s work since seeing her play One for Sorrow at the Royal Court in 2018, and I am delighted to talk to her about her fascinating new play.
Her plays include Sea Creatures (Hampstead Theatre); Love and Other Acts of Violence (Donmar Warehouse); fragments (short, Young Vic); Hedda Tesman, adapt. Henrik Ibsen (Headlong Theatre/Chichester Festival Theatre/Lowry, Manchester); Three Sisters, adapt. Anton Chekhov (Almeida Theatre); One for Sorrow; Lela & Co. (Royal Court Theatre); Confessions (short, Theatre Uncut/Traverse, Edinburgh/Bristol Old Vic) and Best Served Cold (Vault Festival)
She was the recipient of the Berwin Lee Award 2020 and the Harold Pinter Commission 2017. Like Flesh, her opera with composer Sivan Eldar, won the Fedora Opera Prize 2021. Houses Slide, her piece with Laura Bowler, was nominated for an Ivor Award 2022. Cordelia is a MacDowell fellow.
Libretti include Like Flesh (Opéra National de Lille & France Tour); After Arethusa (Venice Musica Biennale); Houses Slide (Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre); A Photograph (Oxford Lieder Festival); Heave (Festival Royaumont), Miranda (Opéra Comique & Europe tour) and you’ll drown, dear (Festival ManiFeste).
Dramaturgy includes a new version of Henry V (Headlong Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe & UK Tour) and Lucia di Lammermoor (Royal Opera House).
Lynn recommended Pity by Rory Mullarkey.
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Thank you very much for listening and for your support.
Douglas
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
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