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- A Mad World, My Masters (23rd)
A Mad World, My Masters, by Thomas Middleton
Thursday 23 June 2011, 7.45PM
Every part of the world shoots up daily into more subtlety.
The very spider weaves her cauls with more art and cunning to entrap the fly.
This latest production by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television’s praised Out of the Blue Theatre Company is the first staff-directed show on the superbly equipped main stage of the Department’s state-of-the art new building on the Heslington East Campus.
Thomas Middleton, one of Shakespeare’s greatest playwriting contemporaries and his close collaborator on several plays, is most famous today for writing two of the finest seventeenth-century tragedies, The Changeling and Women Beware Women.
But he also created a brilliant array of witty and entertaining comedies set in early Jacobean London, which explore with relish a cutthroat urban world, where the “best art” of the inhabitants is “to dissemble well”. A Mad World, My Masters is one of the most inventive of these London comedies.
It takes its audience on an exhilarating whirlwind ride through a series of plots and counterplots, with surprises around every corner and some of the cleverest comic plotting and dialogue of the pre-civil war stage.
The action weaves together two contrasted stories of trickery and deceit (one involving money, the other adultery), in which those who think themselves most cunning - and who may indeed seem to be so - do not always win the race.
The play’s demands will allow the outstanding technical resources in the Department’s new principal theatre to be exploited to the full.
The production, directed by Michael Cordner, in collaboration with Tom Cantrell and Mark Smith, is supported by a generous endowment from the Sylvia and Colin Shepherd Charitable Trust, without which students would not have had the chance to work on such an ambitious project, or to collaborate with the professional designer Alex Lowde, who is responsible for set and costumes on the show.
The Out of the Blue Theatre Company was founded by Michael Cordner and Mary Luckhurst. Its recent successes include Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and Mad Forest (at the York Theatre Royal Studio), John Marston’s The Malcontent (in the Dixon Studio Theatre in Wentworth College at the University), and Raising the Roof (a comedy revue performed in the Dixon and at BAFTA in London in spring 2010).
Art of ladies!
When plots are e’en past hope and hang their head,
Set with a woman’s hand, they thrive and spread. Further details about the show.
The very spider weaves her cauls with more art and cunning to entrap the fly.
This latest production by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television’s praised Out of the Blue Theatre Company is the first staff-directed show on the superbly equipped main stage of the Department’s state-of-the art new building on the Heslington East Campus.
Thomas Middleton, one of Shakespeare’s greatest playwriting contemporaries and his close collaborator on several plays, is most famous today for writing two of the finest seventeenth-century tragedies, The Changeling and Women Beware Women.
But he also created a brilliant array of witty and entertaining comedies set in early Jacobean London, which explore with relish a cutthroat urban world, where the “best art” of the inhabitants is “to dissemble well”. A Mad World, My Masters is one of the most inventive of these London comedies.
It takes its audience on an exhilarating whirlwind ride through a series of plots and counterplots, with surprises around every corner and some of the cleverest comic plotting and dialogue of the pre-civil war stage.
The action weaves together two contrasted stories of trickery and deceit (one involving money, the other adultery), in which those who think themselves most cunning - and who may indeed seem to be so - do not always win the race.
The play’s demands will allow the outstanding technical resources in the Department’s new principal theatre to be exploited to the full.
The production, directed by Michael Cordner, in collaboration with Tom Cantrell and Mark Smith, is supported by a generous endowment from the Sylvia and Colin Shepherd Charitable Trust, without which students would not have had the chance to work on such an ambitious project, or to collaborate with the professional designer Alex Lowde, who is responsible for set and costumes on the show.
The Out of the Blue Theatre Company was founded by Michael Cordner and Mary Luckhurst. Its recent successes include Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and Mad Forest (at the York Theatre Royal Studio), John Marston’s The Malcontent (in the Dixon Studio Theatre in Wentworth College at the University), and Raising the Roof (a comedy revue performed in the Dixon and at BAFTA in London in spring 2010).
Art of ladies!
When plots are e’en past hope and hang their head,
Set with a woman’s hand, they thrive and spread. Further details about the show.
Admission information
Admission by ticket only (£6, Students £4, Group Bookings: 10 for the price of 9). Please go to the tickets page to register.
Location: The Theatre, Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Heslington East Campus, University of York
