Whenever I have visited Peckham as an adult, 90% of it has been to go out clubbing most of the other 10% to watch films at the ebullient Peckhamplex cinema. On a rare visit there a few years ago, she told me “this place smells like Lagos!”) I can’t wait to watch the new film Rye Lane: according to critics, it is a beautifully shot and humane romantic comedy set in Peckham.Īs a south-east Londoner who grew up closer to the Kent borderlands than to the borough of Southwark, Peckham has always seemed exotic to me. Photograph: Photo Credit: Chris Harris/© 20th Century Studios Guardiola’s big failĭavid Jonsson and Vivian Oparah in Rye Lane. The only Jonson play I can name off the top of my head is Volpone, which is Italian for sly fox. From one footnote I learned that in the century after Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’s death, “Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often” as Shakespeare’s. And present-day historians too: from Mary Beard to Niall Ferguson.īut he also examines other influential but unorthodox historians, from William Shakespeare to Leo Tolstoy, from Winston Churchill to Ulysses S Grant. It is about communicating the sheer pleasure of knowledge – that ecstatic state I was in when I received and leafed through my first encyclopaedia as an 11-year-old boy, of discovering a rich seam of facts and figures, personalities and icons.Ĭohen’s book is a history of the writing of history: he looks at canonical historians, from Thucydides to Edward Gibbon, from Herodotus to Thomas Babington Macaulay. It is about myth, fiction, politics it can be expressed through books, articles and television documentaries it can be written or presented by anyone. The Unfortunates was funded in part by a $35,000 grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust.It is all of that. The production runs March 27-November 2 for 95 performances in Ashland’s Thomas Theatre.įounded in 1935, Oregon Shakespeare Festival is among the oldest and largest theatre companies in the United States, drawing nearly 400,000 people to its plays every year. “Perhaps the greatest gift I’ve received from working on The Unfortunates is how it has revitalized my belief in the capacity of music and theatre not only to inspire but to heal and to redeem,” said the play’s director, Shana Cooper. James Infirmary Blues.” After playwright Kristoffer Diaz joined the team, that Midnight Project eventually became The Unfortunates. They met singer-songwriter Casey Hurt, who brought his background in Americana, blues and gospel music, and the four stated writing songs based on events in “The St. The play’s creators, Jon Beavers, Ian Merrigan and Ramiz Monsef had started the a cappella hip-hop group 3 Blind Mice while working as actors in New York City in 2005. Using blues, gospel and hip-hop, the soldiers help one terrified and non-musically inclined comrade transport himself to a fantasy world. The original musical follows a group of political prisoners as they await execution. Brings The Unfortunates to its 2013 SeasonĪs part of its 2013 season, Oregon Shakespeare Festival presents The Unfortunates, an original play conceived and developed by 20 artists and actors at OSF’s in-house Midnight Project, where they showcased the concept and then work shopped it in OSF’s Black Swan Lab.
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