2010 Season Announced
Published December 15th 2010
HighTide Festival returns to Suffolk in 2010 to open Season 2010.
To recap on a magnifigent Season 2009: in March, Stovepipe opened in London as a site specific production with the National Theatre and Bush Theatre. In May we premiered Lucy Caldwell’s Guardians, Jesse Weaver’s Muhmah, and Lydia Adetunji’s Fixer in the 2009 HighTide Festival. Both Fixer and Stovepipe will open in Australia in February 2010 as part of the National Play Festival, Brisbane.
2010 will see a return to core values with the premiere of three unproduced playwrights, discovered and developed by HighTide. These three productions will form the centre of HighTide Festival 2010, which will take place again in Halesworth Suffolk over the May Bank Holiday weekend, April 29th – May 3rd:
Ditch by Beth Steel
Stark and unforgiving, but shot through with a sense of humanity, Ditch is a clear-eyed look at how we might behave when the conveniences of our civilisation are taken away, and a frightening vision of a future that could all too easily be ours. Richard Twyman directs.
Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
Lidless, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's devastating first play, won the 2009 Yale Drama Series Award for Playwriting. A work of extraordinary intelligence and finely-balanced sensibility, it marries the implacable logic of a Greek tragedy with an all-too-modern setting. Steven Atkinson directs.
Lidless is an extraordinary and original attempt to show the enduring strain on the victims of the U.S.'s deployment of torture at Guantanamo. David Hare.
Moscow Live by Serge Cartwright
Moscow Live is based on Serge Cartwright’s experiences in a Moscow newsroom. A very funny but deadly serious look at how truth and news are rarely the same thing, and how individual motives interfere with both. It is a thrilling, thought-provoking and razor-sharp debut. Jonathan Humphreys directs.
Casting for the original HighTide Ensemble opens in January 2010.
The Ensemble will comprise of over 20 actors employed in the fourth HighTide Festival in April and May 2010. Each actor will be offered the opportunity to become part of the Ensemble for an initial period of one year, similar to the attachments to the comapny awarded to our writers and directors.
Throughout the year, there will be a flexible open-door policy to joining the Ensemble. This is with the underlying premise that each actor is approached following involvement with the company in HighTide Festival 2010, in one of the many opportunities the company has to offer this season – the Genesis Laboratory, HighTide readings, and Artistic Residencies at Aldeburgh Music in Snape Maltings. Becoming a member of the Ensemble requires a commitment to its principles, rather than one based on availability or experience.
For more information please contact Greer Dale-Foulkes on casting@hightide.org.uk