Greenwich Theatre brings Michael Frayn’s rarely performed play, Here, to the stage as part of Greenwich Performs, an exciting new multi-arts festival taking place in the Royal Borough.
Here is comedy that asks what it means to exist in the here and now. When Phil and Cath move into their first home, a small one-bed studio flat, nothing before or after this moment matters. Their history together and their potential future all fade from focus and they just live now - but petty disagreements, an eccentric, widowed landlady and a debate about what ‘now’ really means make it hard to decide on anything.
Here was first performed in 1993 at the Donmar Warehouse and then revived in a revised version by The Rose in Kingston in 2012.
To kick off this new run, British novelist and playwright Michael Frayn will attend a Q&A session ahead of the first performance at the theatre on 9th October. The conversation will be led by James Haddrell, Artistic Director at Greenwich Theatre and director of the play, and is set to explore the ideas that fill some of Frayn’s most popular and acclaimed works.
Haddrell said “We are thrilled to have this opportunity to produce such a great play. There aren’t many things that will resonate universally, but the experience of sharing your living space, and often a very small space, for the very first time is something that many, many people have experienced and I’m expecting a lot of laughs of recognition. However, like so much of Michael’s work, while there are certainly a lot of laughs in the play it also asks questions about how we invest different places with meaning, how we use the abstract notion of time to understand our lives, and how important it can be to savour the present moment before it disappears and becomes a new moment. I’m sure we’ll cover a lot of these things in the Q&A before the first performance as well – it will be a huge pleasure to share a conversation with Michael with a larger audience.”
Here will run at Greenwich Theatre as a part of the Greenwich Performs festival, with showings from 9th - 13thOctober.
Greenwich Performs, the brainchild of former QC Tim Barnes, will take places for 2 weeks from the 1st of October. Local man Barnes who is the executor of the Peter Harris Trust wants to launch a local festival celebrating all aspects of the arts.
Other shows running during the Greenwich Perform festival include Changeling Theatre’s production of Measure For Measure, Clown Funeral’s studio show Things We Chose To Save, Chantry Dance’s ballet adaptation of Dracula, and children’s theatre including How To Hide A Lion by Pigtails Productions and Mischief and Mystery in Moomin Valley by Get Lost And Found.
