The Royal Court Theatre's Rough Cut season comes early this year with TEN PLAGUES - marking the beginning of a new musical-theatre collaboration between playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell, performed by the legendary singer Marc Almond on Sunday 25 April at 5pm.
Rough Cuts is a mini-season of experimental readings and works-in-progress presented in June. A rare opportunity to see emerging talents and established playwrights in development, TEN PLAGUES is told entirely through a series of songs and explores humanity's struggle with sickness and death and celebrates our capacity for survival.
London is infected. The dead fall in the streets. As the plague pits fill, the people of London struggle to maintain a society in the face of overwhelming mortality. Based on eyewitness accounts from 1665, TEN PLAGUES relates one man's journey through a city in crisis.
Ten Plagues is commissioned by London Artists Projects.
Mark Ravenhill's previous plays for the Royal Court include Shopping and F******, Product, Shoot/Get/Treasure/Repeat and Over There. For London Artists Projects Ravenhill co-wrote and performed in A Life in Three Acts at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Royal Theatre, The Hague, Soho Theatre, London; and St Ann's Warehouse New York.
Conor Mitchell is a musical dramatist from Co. Armagh, Ireland who has written for
National Theatre, LAMDA, Belfast Festival, and Library Theatre Manchester. He has written over forty theatre scores and as a composer/lyricist, his production Have a Nice Life won Best Score at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2006. In the UK he was the winner of an Arts Foundation Fellowship for musical theatre composition.
Stewart Laing directs and designs theatre and opera. Recent projects include Pamela Carter's new play An Argument About Sex for Tramway Glasgow, La Boheme for Scottish Opera. He is currently designing Peter Grimes for La Scala, Milan. He won a Tony Award for his design of Titanic on Broadway in 1997.
Marc Almond is an internationally successful and acclaimed artist who has sold over thirty million records worldwide and is an icon and influence for a generation of musicians. Marc has pursued an eventful and diverse career in the mainstream and the underground and has worked in many musical styles, while all the time stamping his unique identity on all he does. Over the years Marc has collaborated with a number of artists including Nick Cave, Siouxsie, John Cale, Nico, Antony Hegarty,
Gene Pitney and PJ Proby. In 2009 he released a collection of Russian folk songs Orpheus in Exile, the songs of Vadim Kozin and will be releasing a new album Variete in 2010. 2010 is a milestone year for Marc, celebrating thirty years in music.
For more information, visit online at
www.royalcourttheatre.com.
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