Sport For Jove: Sydney Outdoor Theatre Rep Season
Sport for Jove celebrates its 5th year as a theatre company, and Shakespeare’s 450th birthday in 2014, with an outdoor repertory theatre season of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing in Sydney and the Blue Mountains locations during December 2013 and January 2014.
A season of neo-classical approaches to famous works that explore the agency and determination of women, the risks we take in love, and the foolishness of our vanities, with former Artistic Director of the State Theatre Co. of South Australia, Adam Cook, directing Much Ado About Nothing.
The outdoor summer festival season features two of the world’s original and most finely crafted romantic comedies. A new adaptation of the French masterpiece, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, written and directed by Damien Ryan, and starring Yalin Ozucelik, Scott Sheridan, Lizzie Schebesta and John Turnbull - the tale of the beautiful Roxane and the man who would love her, but for his outrageous nose – the play that brought the word ‘panache’ into the English language! Cyrano will play in rep with Shakespeare’sMuch Ado About Nothing, directed by Adam Cook, starring Tim Walter, Matilda Ridgeway, Vanessa Downing and Julian Garner.
These are two plays with powerful symmetries – stories of our fears of failing in the game of love, and the barriers of wit and prickliness we put up to mask our loneliness and vulnerability; two stories of daring career soldiers who lack the simple courage to express their feelings to a woman; stories of women too witty, sophisticated and intelligent to be easily wooed; and stories that inspire our respect for what it is to be an individual, something a little different from the crowd.
The summer festival season will also feature a series of special events including The Second Age Project, a dynamic new initiative to get high school students from western Sydney out from behind their desks and up on their feet to act Shakespeare. They will perform a new work, devised and directed by George Banders and Francesca Savige, called Exit, Pursued by a Bear. The show will play as a curtain-raiser to Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing in the season at the Sydney Hills Shakespeare in the Park, at Bella Vista Farm in December.
Much Ado About Nothing opens on the weekend of December 7 / 8 and Cyrano de Bergerac on the weekend of December 14 / 15 at Bella Vista Farms in Baulkham Hills
Touring to…
Bella Vista Farms in Baulkham Hills (December 7th – December 30th)
Norman Lindsay Gallery in Faulconbridge (January 4th and 5th)
Everglades Garden in Leura (January 11th – January 26th)