THE EVENTS
30/07/2016 - 20/08/2016
Production Details
Centrepoint collaborates with 17 community choirs on ‘The Events’
Compassionate, masterful and incredibly relevant, The Events was the surprise hit of the 2013 Edinburgh Festival. Acclaimed stage actress Claire Dougan leads this Manawatu production in her Centrepoint debut, joined by Jatinder Singh and a host of community choirs from throughout the lower North Island in a mesmerising fusion of theatre and music.
“Don’t miss this play. I’ve said that before but I’ve never meant it more. The Events plugs you into the heart of the world. It’s traumatic, for sure – by the end I was a complete mess. It is also magnificent.” – Metro NZ
Scottish playwright David Greig will be best known to Manawatu audiences for Midsummer (A Plays with Songs), which was staged at Centrepoint in 2015. For The Events, he explores darker themes with a similar focus on music, asking how far forgiveness will stretch in the wake of evil.
Award-winning director Lara Macgregor, a PNGHS alumni and the former artistic director of Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre, heads the creative team.
Claire, a liberal priest and choir director, regularly meets with her group of singers at the local town hall. But when a troubled young man, armed with a gun, crashes their rehearsal, this community – and the ideals that formed it – are instantly torn apart. The Events explores the aftermath of this atrocity, with Claire embarking on a journey to answer the most difficult question of all: ‘Why?’
Each night, a different community choir performs, providing a soaring soundtrack ranging from traditional hymns to John Browne and Dizzee Rascal. These choirs discover The Events at the same time as the audience, highlighting the importance of community and our responsibility for one another when confronted by tragedy.
“The Events is an important addition to the current, world-wide conversation surrounding national identity and multiculturalism,” says Centrepoint’s artistic director Jeff Kingsford-Brown. “But it also goes a lot deeper than that. In response to what seems like an increasing number of barbaric events around the world, it asks ‘how do we make sense of the senseless?’” Join us for an experience that can only happen in the theatre. “A poignant look at human tragedy.” ̣̣̣̣̣ – The Metro
ABOUT OPEN STAGE:
The Events is Centrepoint’s Open Stage production for 2016. Open Stage is an initiative providing opportunities to those in our community who want to grow creatively in a supported yet rigorous learning environment. It was launched in 2015 with the New Zealand premiere of Nick Dear’s Frankenstein, a production led by two professional actors with support from local artists and Centrepoint’s Basement Co., and presented to sold out crowds and critical acclaim.
THE EVENTS
While the play does not depict violent acts or condone violence, it does deal with themes, situations and language that may not be appropriate for young audiences.
Venue: Centrepoint Theatre, 280 Church Street, Palmerston North
Dates: 29 July-20 August 2016
Times: Wednesday – Saturday 8PM; Sunday 5PM
Tickets: Adult $40; Group (10+) $36; Senior/Under 30/CSC $32;
Tertiary $20; High School $18
Bookings: 06 354 5740 or centrepoint.co.nz
CHOIRS & PERFORMANCES:
Friday 29 July CHB Concert Choir
Saturday 30 July Showcase Singers
Sunday 31 July Viking Choir
Wednesday 3 August Palmerston North Choral Society
Thursday 4 August St. Mark’s & St. Andrew’s Choir
Friday 5 August Kathy Craig Student Choir
Saturday 6 August Manawatu Community Choir
Sunday 7 August Wanganui Lyric Singers
Wednesday 10 August Camerata
Thursday 11 August Renaissance Singers
Friday 12 August Palmerston North Choral Society
Saturday 13 August Wairarapa Singers
Sunday 14 August Schola Sacra
Wednesday 17 August UCOL Choir
Thursday 18 August Wanganui Community Choir
Friday 19 August Manawatu Community Choir
Saturday 20 August Taumaranui Community Choir
Featuring Claire Dougan and Jatinder Singh
Set Design Harold Moot
LX Design Glenn Ashworth
Costume Design Ian Harman
Directing Intern Ania Upstill
Theatre , Musical ,
A deeply disturbing yet fine and important play
Review by John C Ross 31st Jul 2016
How do you get your head around encountering an atrocity? A community has a kind of implicit, quiet power, normally. An otherwise-powerless, culturally alien (or alienated) man who carries out a mass-shooting is for that brief period totally powerful. And that exercise of power goes on in its after-effects: the dead are dead, the survivors are traumatized and disoriented, the dominant community is, locally and temporarily at least, ravaged, demoralized, violated, denied its cultural self-confidence and security.
The experience in the Scottish playwright David Greig’s The Events, premiered in Edinburgh in August 2013, could be located in any Western-style country, including our own. The community is embodied on stage by a choir, and the mode of the play is to combine professional actors (just two of them, playing multiple roles) with actual local choirs, a separate choir for every performance (for Centrepoint’s run of seventeen of them, seventeen choirs, from all around the region!). A couple of choristers are given lines to speak.
For Centrepoint Theatre, mounting this show has a wider rationale, within a scheme to include at least one ‘Open Stage’ production each year, actively including members of the wider community.
In an after-show talk by the director Lara Macgregor, she acknowledges that getting all this working properly has proved even more difficult than they’d expected. Still, work it does, for the first night, with the choir on stage moving around, chatting quietly, singing, and so forth, quite assuredly.
The two main characters are Claire, the choir leader, played here by Claire Dougan, and The Boy, played by Jatinder Singh, although the two actors, especially the man, also take other roles. The time-scheme is quite ingeniously tangled – for the choir, the mass shooting still has yet to happen, at the end, but for Claire, by halfway through, indeed earlier, there are sequences in which it has already happened, and she is struggling desperately to understand it, to comprehend what is possibly beyond comprehension. What possible motivation, or state of mind, can have driven this Boy? Is he mad or evil or what?
The Boy himself, ethnically non-European, appears to offer, in his monologues, not just one mental orientation but several. There is the colonised reacting furiously against the colonisers. There is the alienated, isolated young man self-dramatising as a warrior berserker. And so it goes on, with no one self-explanation.
Certainly Claire Dougan and Jatinder Singh carry off their roles (multiple) impressively well, and the whole production works well.
Harold Moot’s set is simple yet effective – there is the schematic raked seating for the choir, mid-central, with a tea-trolley stage-left for their tea-cups, and a piano downstage right for the accompanist, Roger Buchanan. Glenn Ashworth handles lighting and Ian Harman costume design, assuredly.
It seems, for Claire, you just have pull yourself together and somehow carry on. This is a deeply disturbing yet fine and important play, for our troubled times.
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