"All art is quite useless" -Oscar Wilde

"Don't romaticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matter is what you leave on the page." -Zadie Smith

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting, struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness" -George Orwell

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Eurydice


This is the first story that I wrote for our student publication, Ink Online. In brief, it’s a look at the production of the University’s third play, Eurydice.

The show doesn’t open for another month or so, so I originally intended to focus on the immense amount of effort that goes into producing an hour-and-a-half play. In addition to casting, costumes, and all those more technical aspects of production, I was interested, if not surprised, to learn the sheer amount of time invested in rehearsal. All the actors, and the director, come together for about 20 hours a week for the month leading up to opening night. Apparently way more goes into a play than merely memorizing lines and not forgetting them.

I actually went to one of the rehearsals to take pictures and, though pretty raw, the run-through I watched piqued my interest. The stage was cluttered with wooden frames. I pictured these frames ornately dressed, becoming the visually stunning set Katie Moore described in her interviews. This alone is reason enough for me to go to the actual production.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to lock down an interview with the director, Dan Macdonald before my deadline, so I had to shift the focus of the article more towards the play itself. The play, written in 2003, is a modern retelling of a well-known Greek myth. Those myths have so much humanity in them they have a certain timeless quality. The play should be an interesting combination of old and timeless with the new and timely.

-Noah out

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