New London theatre to open with ‘frighteningly vivid’ unfinished Schiller play

A brand new London theatre, primarily based within the Grade II-listed constructing Rudolf Steiner Home, is to be launched with a play that completes an unfinished work by Friedrich Schiller.

Written by Peter Oswald, Dmitry will open the Marylebone theatre within the refurbished house previously often called Steiner Corridor close to Baker Road. It'll have a world premiere in September. The theatre will programme dance, spoken phrase and music in addition to new performs.

Oswald’s drama is impressed by the unfinished Demetrius, in regards to the eponymous Russian czar in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Schiller labored on his play within the months main as much as his dying in 1805. Dmitry’s director, Tim Supple, mentioned it offers a well timed and “frighteningly vivid” perspective on Russia.

Within the play, Dmitry claims the Russian throne, saying he's the son of Ivan the Horrible, and the Polish military rallies behind him in his bid to topple Boris Godunov. “In Russia, historical past treats him as an aggressive pseudo-pretender,” mentioned Supple. “Schiller was within the conflict between the Roman Catholic church and the Russian Orthodox church. There’s additionally the geopolitical conflict between the west as represented by the papal curiosity in Poland and the east as represented by the Orthodox church in Russia.”

Marylebone theatre in Steiner House, London.
Marylebone theatre in Steiner Home, London. Photograph: PR

Supple mentioned the play thought of Russia’s bid, over the centuries, “to safe round it an enormous sphere of affect and management – and whether or not you look on that as ongoing paranoia or deep-seated cultural aggression or its rightful have to defend itself in opposition to the west’s overwhelming need to own Russia”.

Schiller, greatest recognized for his performs Mary Stuart and Don Carlos, “might take a historic state of affairs and tackle it with compact and very potent verse and provides us a fantastically compelling human drama,” mentioned Supple. He added that Marylebone theatre, which sits simply over 200 folks, is “sufficiently small to be intimate and enormous sufficient to take care of topics of scale”.

The inventive director of Marylebone theatre, and dramaturg of Dmitry, is Alexander Gifford. The actor Mark Rylance, who's amongst its patrons, mentioned he supported the theatre’s plans for “fostering a renaissance in verse drama”. Rylance’s late step-daughter, Nataasha van Kampen, attended a Rudolf Steiner faculty in north London. Rudolf Steiner Home was constructed between 1926 and 1937 because the British residence of the Anthroposophical Society, based to additional the work of the “non secular scientist” Steiner.

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