A brand new theater manufacturing in Manchester is reimagining Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Evening’s Dream—with a drum & bass twist.
The play from award-winning director Stef O’Driscoll will debut at Manchester’s Royal Trade Theatre subsequent month and is alleged to honor the British metropolis’s “synonymous hyperlinks with dance, music and rave tradition,” in response to its synopsis.
Including “sweaty dance-offs and drum and bass love anthems” to Shakespeare’s over 400-year-old comedy, O’Driscoll’s reinterpretation is ready in modern-day Manchester as a substitute of Athens. The Palace of Theseus is now a nightclub of the identical title, the place 4 younger lovestruck ravers settle their quarrels with dance battles.
Rising Manchester-based producer-vocalist SALO, recent from a major stage efficiency on the metropolis’s well-known Parklife competition in June, will soundtrack the manufacturing and assume the position of the Moon, the goddess of music who oversees the “hedonistic” world of O’Driscoll’s creation.
The play is impressed by O’Driscoll’s personal private connection to Manchester’s drum & bass scene, solid over a lifetime of dancefloor recollections that the director says mirror the themes of affection, loss, jealousy, and betrayal in A Midsummer Evening’s Dream.
“My relationship with Manchester has all the time been by its lovely rave scene, primarily drum and bass and jungle music,” O’Driscoll stated in a press release. “I’ve had among the greatest nights out right here in Manchester, with the music of gifted native artists serving because the soundtrack by messy heartaches, painful unrequited like to that new fizzy type of love.”
“Mixing the worlds of Shakespeare and Manchester’s present rave scene, I wished to rejoice that music on this manufacturing and spotlight Manchester’s many gifted artists, rappers, and MCs alongside Shakespeare,” she continued.
Final summer time, a theater manufacturing in Detroit additionally reimagined Shakespeare with a dance music lens, merging the town’s wealthy techno historical past with the story of Prospero from The Tempest.
Stef O’Driscoll’s A Midsummer Evening’s Dream will run at Manchester’s Royal Trade Theatre from September 10 to October 12. Tickets are actually obtainable right here.
Featured picture from Unsplash.com.
