Thursday 15th to Sat 24th November
Directed by Alice Corrigan
Should the truth be pursued whatever the cost? The idealistic son of a wealthy businessman seeks to expose his father's duplicity and to free his childhood friend from the lies on which his happy home life is based.
"The Wild Duck is perhaps the greatest of all Ibsen’s plays, and part of the reason for its greatness is that it combines the bleakest tragedy...with an awareness of human frailty and self-deception that is essentially comic"
The Daily Telegraph
Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is among the most famous modern playwrights, the author of such dramas as Peer Gynt (1867), A Doll's House (1879) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). His first play was published and performed in 1850 (Catiline), the same year he moved to Christiana (now Oslo). He travelled abroad for nearly thirty years (he lived in Rome, Dresden and Munich), wrote plays and directed a variety of theatre companies. During his lifetime he earned an international reputation for his psychological dramas that frequently commented on social issues of the day. His plays are still among the most frequently performed in the world.
David Eldridge was born in Romford, Essex, in 1973 and began writing full time after graduating in English Literature and Drama from Exeter University in 1995. In 1997, Eldridge was Pearson TV playwright in Residence at the Royal National Theatre. In 1996, The Bush Theatre was awarded a Time Out Live Award for its London Fragments season, of which Serving It Up was the second play of three. In 2001, Under the Blue Sky was awarded the Time Out Live Award for Best New Play in the West End. Under The Blue Sky received its American Premiere at the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts in June 2002 and received its premiere on the West Coast of the United States at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in September 2002.
Written in 1883 and 1884, The Wild Duck was a decisive transition piece in the development of one of the greatest playwriting careers of the modern era. The Wild Duck was written after a string of controversial "social" plays had made Ibsen notorious throughout Europe as a crusading reformer. The four plays immediately preceding The Wild Duck, in particular, had launched a new style of prose drama that identified Ibsen with various crusading "liberal" causes: The Pillars of Society (1877) exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of the typical bourgeois leading families; A Doll's House (1879) revealed the tyranny of Victorian-era marriage; Ghosts (1881) attacked, through the taboo topic of syphilis, the folly of preserving "respectability" at the expense of the truth; and An Enemy of the People (1882) pitted private vested interests against polluters who threaten the health of the community. All four plays touched with uncanny insight on raw social issues that, more than a century after Ibsen introduced such subjects into serious social dramas, are still the subject of discussion today.
"David Eldridge's version brings out Ibsen's permanent relevance without any textual coarsening"
The Guardian
| GREGERS | Martin McBride |
| WERLE | David Penrose |
| HJALMAR | Nathan Chapman |
| RELLING | Damon Wakelin |
| MOLVIK | John Scadding |
| OLD EKDAL | Peter Corrigan |
| GINA | Megan Green |
| MRS SØRBY | Sally Hartley |
| HEDVIG | Charley Callaway |
| FLOR | Peter Woodward |
| BALLE | John Scadding |
| PETTERSON | Jeff Bone |
| JENSON | Julie Wood |
| Directors | Alice Corrigan and Liam Penny |
| Producer | Lorraine Galliers |
| Stage Manager | Zoe Chapman |
| Set Design | David Penrosee |
| Lighting Design | Nathan Chapman |
| Costume Design | Sue Dawes |