FYRE Drama's 2011 production: Island
18 Nov 2011 - 20 Nov 2011
For the third year running, FYRE drama will present their latest offering of home-grown Kangaroo Valley theatre at the Upper River Hall.
The community owned hall is set amongst paddocks of grazing sheep with the river running by, but inside the audience will be transported to a whole other world… a remote island where a cast of kings, dukes and princes are brought to their knees by the powerful Prospera and her band of spirited allies.
Island is a re-imagined interpretation of one of William Shakespeare’s final plays The Tempest. It borrows the best of the original’s marvellous characters and plot: a whirlwind of storms and shipwrecks, magic and mayhem, murder plots and sword fights, madness and revenge, while telling the story in language more accessible to a wider audience.
The ‘olde’ English of Shakespeare’s work is so often a barrier to people being able to experience and discover his wonderful stories, his timeless characters, his profound reflections on humanity and his brilliance with metaphor and language.
A book I received as a child, that re-told the stories of Shakespeare in abbreviated and accessible language, was the beginning of my discovery and passion for Shakespeare’s theatre. It was through a desire to share one of my favourite plays and playwrights with my students that I decided to re-write and interpret The Tempest in a way that made it more possible for them to understand and perform and to hopefully ignite a spark of interest in Shakespeare’s other great works in their original glory. The result was Island and while Shakespeare’s epic has now been reduced to eighty minutes and characters have been added and changed, I have strived to keep as many of the bard’s wonderful moments of human interaction and delicious turns of phrase as I could.
Island has something for everyone…with plenty of laughs, action and drama played superbly by a cast of seventeen talented young Kangaroo Valley thespians, it is a great outing for the whole family and a way to support local arts in your community.
Our production of Island will run at the Upper River Hall, just 10 minutes from town, on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 of November at 7 pm and an early matinee on Sunday 20th November at 11am.
Details in advertisement on page 48.
Sarah Butler