in Sea Creatures
at the Hampstead Theatre, London 2023
Photo by Marc Brenner
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More
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).
Additional benefits available to Patrons include Footnotes on the plays covered in the podcast, as well as exclusive access to The Play Review.
Thank you very much for listening and for your support.
Douglas
063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
060 – A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the towering masterpieces of American theatre, distinguished for its frank depiction of sexual compulsion, its lyrical language, and its poignant portrait of mental fragility, as well as the bitter clash between two of the greatest dramatic characters – the damaged and defiant Blanche Dubois and the unrestrained masculine power that is Stanley Kowalski.
As a new production opens in London’s West End, I’m delighted to be joined by Tennessee Williams expert, Professor Thomas Keith, to help survey this giant of a play.
0 Comments