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Search forDiamond season sparkles (with audio)
Friday, August 29, 2008, 07:30
The Playhouse has unveiled an autumn-winter season featuring tales of obsession, tragedy and comedy to mark its 60th birthday. Artistic director Giles Croft directs the season's opener, in September. Vertigo is a taut psychological thriller about madness and obsession.
"Although most of audiences will know the Hitchcock film, our adaptation returns to the roots of the original novel," says Giles.
"Although the theme is the same – a man becoming obsessed with a woman who reminds him of somebody else he thought had died – our version is set in Paris during and after the war."
All Quiet on the Western Front, the classic First World War tale told from a German perspective, is revived after a successful run at the Playhouse two years ago. Giles directs James Alexandrou – Martin in BBC soap EastEnders – in a new adaptation that captures the pity of war from an unusual perspective.
The original novel, by Erich Maria Remarque, of Derby's German twin town of Osnabruck, is hailed as one of the great anti-war tales and, according to Giles, remains resonant today.
A week-long run in October is followed by a national tour.
Something wicked this way comes when Shakespeare's epic study of tyranny, Macbeth, arrives on the Nottingham stage after its premiere in Edinburgh. A co-production with Edinburgh's Lyceum theatre, Giles insists this is a radical remake of the Scottish play – because it returns to the work's roots.
"It's very rare to see a performance of Macbeth set in medieval Scotland featuring Scottish characters," he insists.
The new year sees the return of an old face, popular Nottingham writer Stephen Lowe, whose comic drama about Brian Clough – The Spirit of the Man – was a hit with Nottingham audiences.
Glamour is a new play commissioned by the Playhouse which has its world premiere in February.
"It's an autobiographical story based on an untold chapter in Stephen's early career," Giles reveals.
"As a young budding film-maker, Stephen worked behind the bar and in the ticket office of a Nottingham cinema called Moulin Rouge. It would screen dodgy naturist movies alongside arthouse films by directors such as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Trauffat.
"In his attempt to get his own film, Blue Movie, made and screened, a series of extraordinary events unfold, involving Engelbert Humperdinck and the Kray Twins."
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