The Opera Group
THE LION’S FACE
20 May - 28 July 2010
The Opera Group production, co-produced with Brighton Dome & Festival and Watford Palace Theatre
music by Elena Langer
words by Glyn Maxwell
Winner of an Argus Angel Award at the 2010 Brighton Festival
FOUR STARS “Clearly an opera about dementia isn’t going to be a romp. But I was far more charmed and entertained by The Opera Group’s latest premiere than I expected to be. And touched as well. In its gentler, understated and small-scale way The Lion’s Face finds a way of saying something profound and moving about the condition in which so many of us will spend our final years.... A disturbingly vivid score by the young London-based Russian composer Elena Langer. Full of surreal pastiches, nightmarish scurrying, frightening eruptions, eerie treble voices and disorientating timbres, it is a highly impressive attempt to express in aural terms the turmoil inside a mind that has become permanently unhinged from rational thought, or indeed from its own sense of self.”
The Times
Visit The Lion’s Face website here
Compassionate, heartfelt, strikingly dramatic and often witty, The Lion’s Face is a musical tale of love, loss and family.
The story begins with a man losing his way home, something which signals an irreversible return to childhood. Told through theatre and music, this is not only a highly original and richly-textured take on ageing and memory, but a look at the incomprehension of getting old in the minds of the young.
The Lion’s Face has been developed in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London. Exploring the impact of dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease, the opera describes the experiences of the patient, the carer and the research scientist.
The opera is a collaboration between poet Glyn Maxwell and composer Elena Langer whose first acclaimed work together, The Girl of Sand for the Almeida Theatre, was described as “Hauntingly beautiful… an enticing sonic tapestry.” (Evening Standard).
Visit The Lion’s Face website here for more on this production, for details of off-stage events and to watch preview footage.
This project is taking part in a nine-month UK-wide season of activity about identity from the Wellcome Trust. See http://www.theidentityproject.org.uk
Tour
Brighton Festival
Thursday 20 & Friday 21 May 2010
Oxford Playhouse
Sunday 23 May 2010
Northern Stage, Newcastle
Tueday 25 & Wednesday 26 May 2010
Watford Palace Theatre
Friday 28 & Saturday 29 May 2010
Cardiff: a Keynote presentation at the Cardiff Ageing and Dementia Conference, presented by Gwalia and Glamorgan University
Tuesday 13 July 2010
Cheltenham Festivals
Friday 16 July 2010
Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House
Tuesday 20, Wednesday 21, Wednesday 28 & Thursday 29 July 2010
Director John Fulljames
Conductor Nicholas Collon
Designer Alex Lowde
LX Designer Jon Clark
Sound Designer Fergus O’Hare
Projection Designer Ian Galloway
Cast:
Mr D Dave Hill
Mrs D Elizabeth Sikora
Caregiver Rachel Hynes
Caregiver’s Daughter Fflur Wyn
Clinician Benedict Nelson
Boy Harry Bradford
Cover Boy Jonathan Bircumshaw
Production photos by Alastair Muir
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