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The Show of the Night
Weddings and funerals have such emotional gravitas woven into the fabric of our expectations that they become theatre themselves.
At least that's the implication of a new play The Show of the Night, drawn from 18 months of improvisation and to be presented by the Perennial Theatre Company at Latitude festival theatre arena on Saturday July 17 and the Lion and Unicorn theatre, Gaisford Street Kentish Town from August 2-5 as part of the Camden Fringe Festival.
 | | Melody parker |
And as Kensal Green actress Melody Parker explains, whether it's a gaggle of girls revelling on a hen night, or a the remnants of a cortege drowning their sorrows, both have as much in common as they have conflicts.
Melody, who performed in Macbeth (directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm) at The Royal Theatre before she joined Perennial at its inception, said: "We are a new theatre company that's been together since 2009 and we've done a lot of training together and have worked on becoming a strong ensemble.
"The material for the play was sourced from improvisations that we did on two themes of a hen night and a funeral. We are interested in finding the relationship between theatre and theatrical events in real life. Funerals and hen nights are good examples of that.
"The story is about a group enjoying a hen night and a group of funeral goers, two events which are going on parallel to each other in one night and that both end up at the same bar."
The format raises questions over how the play can resolve the tensions and conflicts it sets up.
"There isn't really the classical solution that you would perhaps look for, it's all about exploring the similarities between those two groups. You might think that there are a lot of differences but actually as the night goes on there are quite a lot of similarities as well, even though there are obviously conflicts," Melody added.
"There are lots of parallels between a funeral and a wedding, or any big event in life. It's always a sense of event and ritual. Of events that have passed in a certain way. And if anything goes wrong there's a massive emotional response to that, because we all have this sense of how it's supposed to be.
"There's something quite theatrical in it that we are interested in exploring."
So The Show of the Night explores the meeting of an out of control hen and in-fighting group of funeral-goers.
The hens' preparations flounder through missed bookings and failed transport, while the funeral goers bicker over the appropriate farewell for their beloved teacher.
As they all end up in the same bar, both groups compete for the spotlight leading to a calamitous final frenzy of cat-fights, staging disasters, costume malfunctions and missed cues.
Artistic director and founder, Suresh Patel, said: "Perennial Theatre Company is essentially an experiment. I wanted to see how the model of a permanent theatre company - a collective of actors and theatre artists, united in technique and artistic identity, intending to work together for a number of years - could function in today's industry.
"We've all heard the legends of other companies throughout history who achieved this sort of existence and of the theatre they were in the unique position to create. And while I think everyone understands the merits of this type of set-up, too few today seem able or willing to follow through on this except in a seemingly accidental or compromised way. I was fed up of reading about this ideal in history books - I wanted to create it first hand, and Perennial is the product of that."
Tickets at £7.50 for the Lion & Unicorn are available on 08444 77 1000 or www.camdenfringe.org
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