With audiences down a fifth on pre-pandemic levels and skilled technicians moving to better paid jobs in Scotland’s burgeoning film and television production centres, theatre is facing “a rocky time” with “every headwind against us” according to David Greig, Artistic Director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre.
Speaking at the launch of the theatre’s 2023 programme, an upbeat Mr Greig promised “big, exciting stories” and “a bold new season of transformative live experiences, all made by creative teams led by women”. But he admitted encouraging people back into theatres is going to be hard following the double set-back of the pandemic and the ongoing cost of living crisis, and that to survive and thrive Scottish theatre needs to find new audiences and new ways of reaching out to them.
Mihaela Bodlovic (Image: Mihaela Bodlovic)
David Greig, Artistic Director of Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre
The 2023 season begins in February with the world premiere of Macbeth (An Undoing), a new version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play written and directed by Zinnie Harris. Produced in partnership with a theatre company in New York, it places Lady Macbeth centre stage and keeps here there throughout.
Following its win in the Women’s Prize For Playwriting in 2020 and a staged reading at the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival, You Bury Me returns to the Lyceum in March in a production directed by Katie Posner. Written anonymously using the pseudonym Ahlam by a playwright who fears for her safety and that of her family, it tells the story of six young Egyptians as they find their way in life against the backdrop of societal repression and political turmoil.
Also opening in March is Castle Lennox, which will provide the ground-breaking Lung Ha Theatre Company with its first main stage piece of work and the biggest production in its history. The company, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2024, was founded to give opportunities to actors with a learning disability and has mounted over 40 original productions featuring over 300 performers. This play by Linda McLean is set in Lennox Castle Hospital, once Scotland’s largest institution for people with learning disabilities, and is inspired by her own experience of visiting an uncle in a similar institution in the 1960s.
Blending 1980s synth-pop, 1990s ballads, American rock and roll and Gaelic folk songs, Kidnapped is an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-loved adventure novel by the creative team of writer/director Isobel McArthur and musician Michael John McCarthy. Kidnapped has its world premiere in April. Meanwhile the pair’s Olivier Award-winning Jane Austen comedy Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of) returns to the Lyceum next month after a barnstorming run in London’s West End.
Four years in the development, Lesley Hart’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic 1878 love story Anna Karenina opens in May. Another world premiere, it is a collaboration with fast-rising, Russian-born director Polina Kalinina who promises a bold re-imagining of one of the greatest works of 19th century literature. “Anna’s story is about passion, truth and rebellion,” said Ms Kalinina. “She joins countless other women in history who are punished for not adhering to the rigid roles created for them … She isn’t perfect, she is often a bit of a hot mess express, but that just makes her more gloriously human.”
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