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School/Department:School of Drama
Type:Production
Title:Academy Drama: The Park
Date/Time/Venue:
Language:Cantonese
Category:Drama
Creative Team:Playwright: Botho Strauss, Director: Ceri Sherlock, Translator: Jessica Yeung, Production Designer: Bill Haycock, Associate Set Designer: Jan Wong, Associate Costume Designer: Jackie Lam Pui-yee, Lighting Designer: Leo Cheung
Cast:Academy School of Drama students



Description:Drama in Cantonese, English and Putonghua with Chinese and English surtitles

Der Park, by the great German playwright Botho Strauss, is a five act drama that explores themes and characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a contemporary setting. In a way it is the dark side of Shakespeare's play, the dream turned into an inescapable nightmare. The story centers around Oberon and Titania, who, hoping to rekindle the dynamic force of love and harmony on earth, visit the night-life in a city park, the haunt of social outsiders and the young. However, their 'magic' powers fail as they themselves mingle with humankind and merge with reality. Eventually they become mortal and join in the moral maze of human relationships. Like Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream it largely plays over the span of the full moonˇ¦s waxing and waning (four nights), the fabled period when 'lovers turn to lunatics'.

Botho Strauss' play, although modern in its setting, retains magical and mythological elements that both frame and disrupt the text principally through the characters of Oberon (King of the Fairies), Titania (Queen and Goddess of the Moon) and Cyprian (a kind of amalgam of Puck and Daedalus ˇV Father of Icarus, who created the Labyrinth). In this way he reminds us that behind both plays are the myths of ancient Greece pertaining to the Minotaur and Pasiphae, the tragic woman who was cursed with love-lust for a bull. This is of course transposed by Shakespeare into the comedy of Titania falling in love with an Ass but in The Park is retained in its original form as befits a postmodern drama in which layers of the past, of history and memory, are unpeeled in the complex nuances of human behaviour.

The programme contains bad language and the portrayal of sex and violence, only suitable for audience age 18 or above.
No late comers will be admitted into the theatre until intermission (if available)
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