Theatre / Akiya Henry
Bristol Old Vic’s Medea: inside the rehearsal room
Bristol Old Vic artistic director Tom Morris has penned this letter to Bristol from the rehearsal room where BOV’s all-female production of Medea, with a modern storyline by Chino Odimba, is making its final touches ahead of tonight’s opening
“You can almost taste the anticipation at Bristol Old Vic today. The backstage crew buzz around the building – plotting, fetching, mending, fixing. In a hushed auditorium, the final touches are being put into place as our phenomenal team prepare to welcome an audience for the first time. This evening, the building will host the first powerhouse performance from our all-female Medea company; and it feels very special indeed. Not least because it feels uniquely Bristolian.
Michelle Fox and Akiya Henry in rehearsals. All pics: Jack Offord
“The precious Bristolian recipe over the centuries has been the coupling of classic text and bold innovation, in casting, adaptation and staging; in recent times we’ve seen the likes of Jeremy Irons, Timothy West, Stephanie Cole, Daniel Day Lewis, Peter O’Toole, Alan Rickman, Pete Postlethwaite and Olivia Colman, launch a stratospheric acting career through a Bristol Old Vic re-imagined classic.
is needed now More than ever
“It is in this spirit that I write to you from the rehearsal room of George Mann and Chino Odimba’s re-imagining of Euripides’ greatest play Medea. What they have created has such searing emotional power that Bristol will treasure its memory, just as they treasured those listed above in years gone.
Kezrena James and Jessica Temple
“Whether Akiya Henry in the title role, or George Mann the director will be the name you remember most, or indeed any among Michelle Fox, Eleanor Jackson, Kezrena James, Stephanie Levi-John and Jessica Temple, the ensemble who fill out the company is fittingly in the lap of the gods. It may even be the co-composer Jon Nicholls, who has devised with the company a method of incantation of Robin Robertson’s blistering translation of Euripides’ text which both feels startlingly modern and echoes the way in which the original Greek would have been performed in Athens.
Stephanie Levi-John
“So, here’s your invitation, as someone who has enjoyed one or more of recent smash hit classics, to reach out for the radical and prophetic text of Euripides in one hand, and the astonishing vision of George (Pink Mist) Mann’s cast and creative team in the other and discover a production which I think you might remember for many years.
Medea opens at Bristol Old Vic tonight, Friday, May 5 and continues until Saturday, May 27. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/medea.html
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