By Mervyn Peake Stage Adaptation by John Constable September 18 to 27, 2008 Frederic Wood Theatre
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Presents: by Mervyn Peake Stage Adaptation by John Constable September 18 to 27, 2008 Frederic Wood Theatre The UBC Department of Theatre and Film presents an intimate conversation with: Richard Ouzounian (playwright, producer, director, and currently theatre critic for The Toronto Star) as TH E NA K ED CR ITIC Wednesday, September 24, 12-1 pm Dorothy Somerset Studio Theatre 6361 University Boulevard Everyone is welcome. Bring your lunch! A Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni Translated & Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher& Paolo Emilio Landi extra event series October 14 to 18, 2008 7:30 pm Dorothy Somerset Studio Theatre Directed by Stephen Heatley November 13 to 22, 2008 Frederic Wood Theatre by Kevin Kerr Directed by UNITY Stephen Drover (1918) Presents: by Mervyn Peake Stage Adaptation by John Constable Directed by Stephen Malloy Scenography by Ronald Fedoruk Costume Design by Carmen Alatorre Songs by Patrick Pennefather Original Music by Cristina Mihaela Istrate Sound Design by Jason Ho September 18 to 27, 2008 Frederic Wood Theatre Welcome to Theatre at UBC, 2008-09 The opening of a new theatre season is always an exciting event, and in my 36(!) years at UBC I’ve never been more excited than I am about this one. We’ve got world classics (Medea and A Servant of Two Masters), modern Canadian classics (Unity (1918) and Billy Bishop Goes to War), an English Gothic fantasy (Gormenghast), and an American comedy about a Russian novel (The Idiots Karamazov). Two of these shows are directed by UBC Theatre faculty, two by Theatre alumni—Billy Bishop and Unity, both Governor General’s Award winners written by two of our other alumni—and two by current graduate students in the Theatre Program. All of them feature our Acting, Design and Production students and faculty. We’re also co-presenting with the PuSh Festival the great Québecoise theatre artist Marie Brassard (The Invisible), and we’re involved in various ways with the UBC School of Music Opera Ensemble’s Hänsel und Gretel and Falstaff. What a fantastic line-up! And wait until you hear the final details of our public symposium, Canada and the Theatres of War, being held in the Frederic Wood Theatre, November 18-19, in conjunction with our Canadian war plays, Billy Bishop and Unity. Confirmed participants so far include historian J.L. (Jack) Granatstein, playwright/directors John Gray, Kevin Kerr, Dennis Garnhum and Judith Thompson, filmmaker Anne Wheeler, theatre scholars Sherrill Grace and Alan Filewod. I guarantee that it will be one of the highlights of the Fall term. So what better way to blast off this fantastic season than with a literally fantastic play. Translating a complex novel for the stage is never easy. Transporting a cult novel whose fans are fan-atical is doubly challenging (remember the fate of Lord of the Rings, the Musical). Staging a Gothic phantasmagoria that takes place over 14 years “in the crumbling vastness of Gormenghast Castle”—well, if anyone can do it, director Stephen Malloy and his team of UBC Theatre faculty and students can. So give yourself over to the weird and wonderful pleasures of Gormenghast. And visit us again soon. Theatrically yours, Jerry Wasserman Head, Department of Theatre and Film UBC Vancouver 2 About the Gormenghast Trilogy Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy has of late grown far beyond its reputation as a cult classic in the UK and into the mainstream of fantasy, as a book no reader interested in Gothic dare to miss. It is one of the most distinctive, absorbing and wonderfully strange books ever written. The books are a curious amalgam of fantasy, comedy, and horror, but they don't fit easily into any known genre. No other work rivals the elaborate phantasmagoria of these British classics which novelist Anthony Burgess called “uniquely brilliant” and Punch described as “the finest imaginary feat in the English novel since Ulysses…” The books must be appreciated on their own terms outside the normal categories of fiction as a gigantic feat of sustained invention, a vicarious dream of extraordinary vividness and a triumph of visual writing. “TheGormenghast trilogy is about Titus Groan and his ascent toward manhood,” writes Robert Ostermann in The National Observer. “But to speak of these novels as being ‘about’ anything is as inadequate as saying The Odyssey is about a man trying to get home to his wife. Such fiction is first and foremost about itself… These novels are not an echo or an imitation of life. Their life is their own – a bizarre, often awe-full life. And it imposes itself with obsessive force on the reader.” Peake did not originally set out to create a trilogy. If he had remained healthy, he would likely have tracked Titus into old age with a fourth and fifth book. But in the three books he did produce, he created a strange yet substantial kingdom of nightmare and fairy tale, filled with bizarre characters, curiosities, and distortions. It was only after his death in 1968 when the Gormenghast novels were reissued by Penguin that Peake began to achieve the tremendous success and recognition he had been unable to attain in his lifetime. Today the books have been translated into over 30 lan guages and a sense of myth surrounds the trilogy which has given them the status of modern classics. 3 MERVYN PEAKE artist, illustrator, novelist, poet (1911 – 1968) Each day I live in a glass room Unless I break it with the thrusting Of my senses and pass through The splintered walls to the great landscape. –Mervyn Peake, A Reverie of Bone Mervyn Peake was a man of many talents, a creative virtuoso, and an eccentric genius. His creative life was cut short, but he provided an abundance of work - enough for several men. Illustrator, painter, poet, novelist and playwright, he represents a creative phenomenon, a man with an intense and individual inner vision that could find expression in a variety of ways. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast trilogy; Titus Groan [1946], Gormenghast [1950], and Titus Alone [1959], a work of grotesque Gothic fantasy with a very dark sense of humor to which his vividly imaginative drawing style was well matched (originally, however, the books were published without his accompanying illustrations). These books de- scribe the life of Titus, 77th Earl of Groan in his decaying ancestral home of Gormenghast castle, his struggle to escape from it and to find a new identity. They have been translated into over 30 languages and have achieved a kind of cult status in England, while in North America few have heard of the kingdom of Gormenghast. Peake was born in Kuling, China, in 1911 to English missionary parents, Ernest Cromwell Peake, a doctor, and Elizabeth (Powell) Peake. He spent his childhood in Tientsin in the North, surrounded by the fragile milieu and destitution of an exotic country in the thick of a collapsing imperial dynasty. China, an ancient country of rich tradition and dense ritual, made a lasting impression on him. At the age of 12 he returned to England with his family (never to return to China) and attended Eltham College in Kent, Croydon School of Art, and, from 1929 to 1933, the Royal Academy Schools. He exhibited his paintings for the first time in 1931. When a former professor from Eltham invited him to join the artists' colony on Sark, a small and bleakly beautiful island in the English Channel, Peake moved promptly. He lived and worked there from 1933 to 1935, exhibiting his paintings yearly in London. Some islanders on Sark remarked that they often saw him painting outdoors wearing nothing but an elegant hat. He needed to make a living, and so, in 1936, Peake began teaching at Westminster School of Art. It was there he met and wooed his muse, the painter Maeve Gilmore. This same year he was commissioned to design the sets and costumes for The Insect Play. Mervyn and Maeve were married in 1937 when she was 19 and he was 26. Together they had three children: Sebastian (born in 1940), Fabian (1942), and Clare (1949). 4 Before he wrote “the Titus books,” as he called them, Peake was a noted illustrator of classic children's books including Treasure Island and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His in-depth study of renowned illustrators (including William Hogarth, George Cruikshank, Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Gustave Doré, and Francisco de Goya) served as the foundation for his own work. His illustrations are now highly sought after. During World War II Peake served in the army and, after a difficult period during which he failed to be registered as a War Artist he was conscripted and sent into the Royal Artillery, then the Royal Engineers. Ultimately he achieved his ambition when he received an assignment as a War Artist. In 1943 he was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to paint the glassblowers depicting the manufacture of cathode ray tubes at a Birmingham factory. This experience also resulted in a poem “The Glass Blowers” which became the title poem in a collection. It was while he was in the army that he began work on Titus Groan, a manuscript whose handwritten pages are also covered with vivid illustrations. These illustrations were essential to Peake who observed that: “As I went along I made drawings from time to time which helped me to visualize what sort of things they (the characters) would say.” Peake, often wrote in blank books called “publisher's dummies,” and would send his chapters back to Maeve, who listed them as one of the three things she would save in the event of an air raid.