Another brilliant production from Red Phoenix now playing at Holden Street Theatres
Promising playwright Jessica Swale’s excellent script is set in Cambridge and Girton College in 1896-7, when girls were meant to marry and become domesticated and not use their clearly inferior brains.
With COVID restrictions making economically-viable live theatre difficult, Red Phoenix and Holden Street have come up with an ingenious solution.
The Prisoner of Second Avenue concerns a middle-aged couple who have an apartment in New York in the seventies when New York had the highest crime rate in the world, rising unemployment in addition to common city problems of noise and smells assaulting the senses.
Caligula (Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus) was the third Emperor of the Roman Empire known for supposedly sleeping with all his sisters, executing landowners to take control of their lands, closing granaries to cause starvation and taking the wives of his senators and putting them into brothels (when he wasn't killing their children). Also, he reputedly had conversations with the moon and adored his horse so much that he was going to make it a member of the Roman Senate.
Lettice Douffet, the over-the-top guide at Fustian House, provides embellished narratives to the bored tourists who visit. Her nemisis arrives as Charlotte (Lotte) Schoen , who the opposite of Lettice, plain, boring, tightly controlled and working for the Preservation Trust that runs the tours.
oseph Merrick was one of the most unique and intriguing characters of British medical history. He was so beset with deformity that he was known as The Elephant Man.
The Guild's latest production is John Graham's first time as director for them and, if this is anything to go by, hopefully it will be the first of many.