Archives: Projects

Script Jonathan Holloway and John Milton
Direction Graeme Rose & Jonathan Holloway
Music and Sound Design Sarah Llewellyn

Performances June – July 2010 at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, The Brewhouse Taunton and Lincoln’s Drillhall Arts Centre

The Scotsman’s Hot Show * * * * Edinburgh 2009: “The Fall of Man is full of beautifully detailed observations. A brooding intensity is prevalent throughout… compellingly urgent performances… The poetic imagery of Milton’s classic is dynamically juxtaposed against the work of contemporary writer Jonathan Holloway, who captures his two characters through beautifully observed and stylistically distinctive dialogue. The chemistry… is at times electrifying, with repressed sexual tension building up to an explosive conclusion. Red Shift are a terrific company… a tribute to the kind of fleeting passions that make life worth living.”

The Guardian: “It is not the way that the tale pans out to its eventual and inevitable sordid end that matters, so much as the way the story is told. Working with only a bed, three simple lights and Sarah Llewellyn’s insistent soundscape, the production creates an intense intimacy that implicates its audience; you feel slightly soiled watching it. It also boasts two assured and brave performances.”

Three Weeks: * * * * “A bold, impressively performed production that endows a difficult literary work with graphic contemporary resonance.” One4review.com: * * * * “In the intimate space, barely lit by small domestic light bulbs, good performances are drawn from both performers in this strong hard hitting performance” Metro: * * * * “Casting the audience as culpable voyeurs by having us cluster round their bed, this is a branding iron of sex and guilt.” EdinburghGuide.com: * * * * “This is a superbly inventive and beautifully adapted piece that grips the audience in a vice and refuses to let them escape.”

Also produced by The Right Brain Project, Chicago, 2013

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THE FALL OF MAN

Celebrated by press and public at the Edinburgh Festival 2009, June/July 2010 saw Red Shift touring this unusually intimate, hard-hitting ‘micro’ theatre piece to Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, Taunton’s Brewhouse Theatre and Lincoln’s Drill Hall Arts Centre where it was again lauded by audiences and industry observers. In 2012 Chicago’s Right Brain Project made their own production in a converted industrial unit near Lake Michigan. Chicago Theater Beat **** “Holloway has managed to find a wry sweet spot between pathetically predictable characters and a timeless masterpiece” New City Stage Recommended “That’s why Jonathan Holloway’s update/homage is so compelling; we see how relevant Milton’s themes remain today. Holloway intersperses segments of Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost,” detailing Adam and Eve’s fall, within the narrative of married businessman Peter (Corey Noble) and nanny Veronica (Anna Robinson) who contemplate and then conduct an affair.”

The Fall of Man played to full houses following Red Shift’s decision to move away from conventional touring and, at least for a while, create new work sensitive to locations and contexts. It was generally agreed the show confirmed the company’s position at the forefront of UK practice previously established over 27 years of innovation.

“It is not the way that the tale pans out to its eventual and inevitable sordid end that matters, so much as the way the story is told. Working with only a bed, three simple lights and Sarah Llewellyn’s insistent soundscape, the production creates an intense intimacy that implicates its audience; you feel slightly soiled watching it. It also boasts two assured and brave performances”. – Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

The Scotsman: * * * * (featured Hot Show) “they have created another provocative piece – on the surface a small story of a briefly lived-out relationship, but more fundamentally, a tribute to the kind of fleeting passions that make life worth living.” Three Weeks: * * * * “A bold, impressively performed production that endows a difficult literary work with graphic contemporary resonance.”One4review.com: * * * * “In the intimate space, barely lit by small domestic light bulbs, good performances are drawn from both performers in this strong hard hitting performance”Metro: * * * * “Casting the audience as voyeurs by having us cluster round their bed, this is a branding iron of sex and guilt.” EdinburghGuide.com: * * * * “This is a superbly inventive and beautifully adapted piece that grips the audience in a vice and refuses to let them escape.” The List: “powerful body language, unnerving music, and the clash of native and non-native idioms and priorities create loaded moments”, Fringe Review.co.uk: “sexy and gratuitous, combining a fun romp with the sometimes fraught politics of sexual relationships, and make this piece delightfully watchable despite the sometimes heavy emotional content”, Broadway Baby: “with strong language, nudity and sexual situations. The audience surrounds the stage on three sides and is very close, giving a strong sense of immediacy and reality to the performances. It feels like we’re eavesdropping on something very private and intense.”, Fest/The Skinny: “Since the early 1980s, Red Shift has gained a reputation for innovative theatre and this latest piece comes as no exception… unfalteringly bold in simulating sex and violence… Performed in the round against an intimate set comprising just a single bed, this is never gratuitous, simply visceral.”

The show required an intimate claustrophobic situation, needed only minimal technical support and because of its length (40 mins) could be played twice in an evening.

The Story: Sited in the bed-sitting room of Slovenian child minder Veronica. Visited in the early hours by Peter – father of the children she nannies – we watch their adulterous relationship fall apart in near darkness. An intense theatrical experience played with the audience huddled around their single bed. Unforgiving in its explicit physicality and emotional depth. Skirmishing across issues of the actor-audience relationship. High tragedy in a tiny domestic environment. Huge words. Throwaway remarks. Candid love-making eclipsed by mistrust. Red Shift welcomed Graeme Rose back to the company for this ambitious risk-taking event: Graeme is a theatre-maker committed to developing innovative, collaborative work. A co-founder of companies Glory what Glory, Stan’s Cafe and The Resurrectionists, he is also associate artist with Bodies in Flight, and has worked repeatedly with the likes of Insomniac Prods, Talking Birds and Red Shift.

Much Ado About Nothing is one of the best loved ‘comedies’ of the classic repertoire. Teeming with glamorous young things, hilarious clowns and serious men of state, Red Shift’s absorbing ensemble production also emphasises the real meat of the text with its threatening atmosphere of humiliation, revenge and the startling brutality that lives behind the smiling mask of Shakespeare’s Sicily.

• 

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Italy is divided into warring factions, brother against brother. We join the characters at the end of a brief but bloody conflict that has left a palpable atmosphere of suspicion and latent violence hanging in the air. Stalked by danger, two loving relationships splutter into life – one mature, cynical and guarded, the other youthful and impetuous – the courses of which are perverted and brought to the brink of disaster by the machinations of two ruthless, manipulative brothers.

Red Shift stayed faithful to Shakespeare’s craftsmanship while reinterpreting characters, scenes and passages of dialogue in an unfamiliar way that rendered an old friend into a driving contemporary narrative. The result was an evening of inventive and challenging theatre, unexpected shocks and laughter, respect for the text and outrageous liberties in equal measure.

Running at just 90 mins, this was both an entertainment and a thought-provoking re-imagining; a highly theatrical ensemble entertainment with intellectual weight. Nominally set in the excoriating moral vacuum of Yugoslavia in 1991, this production quickly earned the same respect and acclaim that previously met Red Shift’s ‘without witches’ Macbeth, which toured the world winning awards, and a First Quarto Hamlet based on what academics call the ‘bastard’ text, that was a huge success and played in over 50 theatres.

Also produced with students of E15 Acting School 2019

By Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
Adapted & directed by Jonathan Holloway
Designed by Neil Irish
Music by Jon Nicholls

AUTUMN 2006 & SPRING 2007

Vertigo Pathol. a sensation of dizziness resulting from a disorder of the sense of balance.
a whirling around, from vertere to turn

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• 

Paris, 1940 – The Germans are massed on the French border. Invasion is imminent. Roger Flavieres – a vertigo sufferer living under the shadow a colleague’s death that he was powerless to prevent – is asked to follow a friend’s wife in order to discover her secrets…
Vertigo is a wonderfully plotted thriller. It is also an allegory. Its concern with loss of identity; with a man’s desire to punish his partners, to control, to strip them of the qualities they were drawn to in order to vanquish the threat of losing them; with his own depression and guilt, all cast an intriguing light on the French experience of invasion and occupation.

Boileau and Narcejac are joint authors of a series of gothic pulp thrillers that have given cinema some of its most fascinating and enduring source material. LES DIABOLIQUES and EYES WITHOUT A FACE stand as intriguing moments in modern French film-making, great storytelling underpinned by a startling understanding of the darker aspects of sexual attraction. This uniquely Gallic combination of sensational populism and intellectual substance can be found all through modern French literature from Sartre to Catherine Millet’s relentless chronicle of her sexual exploits with strangers. This collision of the cerebral and the vulgar perfectly suits Red Shift – a theatre company renowned for its heady mix of entertainment and aesthetics.

Also produced by Nottingham Playhouse 2008 and by Oxfordshire Touring

By Ted Lewis
Adapted & Directed by Jonathan Holloway
Designed by Neil Irish
Music arranged by Jon Nicholls

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 2006
TOURED AUTUMN 2005 & SPRING 2006

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1971: A Northern steel town. Forget nostalgia – flares and retro – this is a dark criminal underworld: sexist, racist and violent. Get Carter is a roller-coaster ride of loud, bruising theatre that pulls us into the seedy twilight of British gangland culture; a landscape of gaudy casinos and cheap hotels flourishing on corruption, bribery and sexual abuse.

London gangster Jack Carter returns to his northern hometown to investigate his brother’s death. He cuts a swathe through the local low life, and soon exposes a network of corruption stretching from back-room porn films to the upper tiers of local government. Hell-bent on revenge, will Jack find his man before his number’s up?

Get Carter is a provocative, shocking, perfectly structured tale of twentieth century sin, revenge and redemption. This hard-boiled, quintessentially British thriller offers an enthralling and compulsive take on a spiteful post-deferential, post-summer-of-love Britain.

Red Shift presents Ted Lewis’s brutal 70’s story with a stunning soundtrack featuring classic hits from The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and more. Jonathan Holloway’s adaptation will be the first stage version of the book that launched the cult movie Get Carter starring Michael Caine as British cinema’s most celebrated hard man. Red Shift is mounting this production to follow hot on the heels of its successful stage premiere of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, also adapted and directed by Jonathan Holloway.

By Graham Greene
Adapted & Directed by Jonathan Holloway
Designed by Neil Irish
Music composed by Ross Brown

TOURED AUTUMN 2004 & SPRING 2005

1948, Vienna – black-marketeers run rings around the occupying forces; racketeers traffic in essential drugs; murders are commonplace as refugees and members of the old order jockey for position, reinventing themselves with false identities.

Amidst the chaos of liberation a naive pulp novelist,Rollo Martins, arrives in Vienna to meet up with his old school-friend, Dr Harry Lime, only to learn that he has been killed in a car accident. Suspicious of foul play he stays on in the city to seek the truth about his friend’s death, but as he pursues the shadowy presence of the ‘third man’ present at Harry’s accident he finds himself embroiled in a plot more chilling and twisted than any of his own titles.

Red Shift’s journey into this tortured landscape explored the tension, fear and cruelty that lives at the heart of one of Graham Greene’s most compelling and accessible thrillers.

October 2004 marked Greene’s centenary. Renowned for inventive adaptations, sumptuous design and musical innovation, Red Shift presented a gripping stage version of one of his most acclaimed tales; a study of the aftermath of war, of victory and defeat, and the anonymity within which morality and humanity become vulnerable.

Adapted by R.L. Lane from the novella by Herman Melville
Directed by Jonathan Holloway
Designed by Neil Irish
Music composed by Ross Brown

2 x Touring Productions in 1996 and 2004

“I could tell you stories to make you good-natured gentlemen laugh …you sentimental souls weep.
But no. I would waive them all to relate a few passages in the life of Bartleby,
who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw or heard of!”

Bartleby. Revival of Red Shift’s celebrated 1996 Edinburgh Festival production.

Wall Street. 1850s. Standard, a prosperous lawyer, hires the mild-mannered Bartleby to join his staff of scriveners who must spend their days copying documents page for page, line for line, word for word.

The fragile harmony of Standard’s team of eccentric drones is upset by Bartleby’s silent dedication. When, without warning, the spectral newcomer stops working simply because he “would prefer not to”, the office slides towards chaos in a theatre event that veers wildly from farce to tragedy and back again.

Its portrayal of a lonely, inexplicably afflicted figure whose actions test the tolerance, indeed the humanity of his fellow men goes to the heart of our own treatment of the damaged and dispossessed.

Supported by The Big Issue and MIND

Adapted and Directed by Jonathan Holloway
Choreographed by Paul Sadot of Urban Expansions & Capoeira Norte
Designed by Neil Irish
Music by Jon Nicholls

AUTUMN 2003

“It sometimes comes about that as a mans life lengthens the sins of the past gain significance and break him down…”

To celebrate their 21st year at the forefront of touring theatre Red Shift turns its hand to the mass of fable and legend that is King Arthur; a world of passionate love affairs, treachery and revenge, a world torn apart by the contradictions bewteen power and responsibility.

Do not expect a cosy rendition of a tale made familiar through repetition. Arthur’s Utopian Camelot is set in a sleek new world, where battle scenes will be enacted through the martial art form Capoeira, against a thunderous mix of cutting-edge beats and traditional Brazilian rhythms. Embracing the legend’s spirituality and violence, exploring themes of sin redemption and betrayal, Red Shift will prove this is a story worth telling again and again…