Wild as a Tempest or a World at War
Acting and performance students ready for The Sea (from left) – Amanda Wilkie, Ross Gibbons and Bethany Leitch.
Release date: 24/04/2012
Dundee College acting and performance students are offering an absurd comedy with their production of The Sea, by Edward Bond.
Described by director, John Mitchell, as a sort of War of the Worlds meets The Tempest, the lecturer goes on to define Bond’s play as a Chekovian comedy.
“Written in the 1970s the play is set in a coastal village during the Edwardian era – about the same time as H G Wells’ War of the Worlds,” explains the lecturer.
“While the play starts with a tragedy, a man drowning at sea during a storm, how the eccentric characters deal with the aftermath of this event certainly has its moments of pathos as well as high farce.
“The comedy is delivered to the audience through the absurdity of characters who take themselves far too seriously. Ultimately, Bond’s play is a coruscating attack on that most venerable of British institutions – the class system.”
Two of Bond’s more extreme creations are Hatch, a mad draper who believes that insidious aliens are trying to invade the minds of the locals; and Mrs Rafi, the local lady of the manor who enjoys torturing the lower classes in general, just because she can, and Hatch in particular.
Mrs Rafi believes that: “You can say anything you like as long as you can carry it off.”
Meanwhile the rest of the inhabitants of their coastal village are waiting for body of the drowned man to be washed ashore, including a survivor of the tempest, Willy Carson, whom Hatch firmly believes to be an alien!
Willy, for his part is keen to console his dead colleague’s fiancée, who is Mrs Rafi’s niece.
A total of 15 first-year HND students are involved in the production at The Space, Dundee College Kingsway Campus, which sets the action firmly on the east coast of Scotland.
The Sea runs from Wednesday-Friday, April 24-27, curtain up, 7.30pm: tickets are free on the door on the night (subject to availability), bar open from 7pm. There is also an extra matinee performance on Friday at 1.30pm.