Mockingbird Theatre to Present THE JUDAS KISS, 3/15-22

The Judas Kiss is David Hare's poignant and moving portrait of Oscar Wilde's one-sided love for Lord Alfred Douglas - a love which proved to be his salvation and destroyer alike. Season: March 15 - March 22, 2014 - 8 PERFORMANCES ONLY. BOOK NOW

Mockingbird Theatre Company Members Chris Baldock and Soren Jensen feature in The Judas Kiss, the acclaimed drama about the power of all-consuming love and the cruelty of betrayal, by English playwright David Hare. Opening in West End and Broadway in 1998, it is directed by Mockingbird Theatre Associate Director Jason Cavanagh and opens at Theatre Works St.Kilda, on Saturday March 15, 2014 at 8pm.
It is 1895 and Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest , is playing in the West End after a triumphant premiere, but already the wheels are in motion which will lead to his imprisonment, downfall and vilification. Forced to make a choice between his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), and his freedom, the ever-romantic Wilde embarks on a course towards self-destruction. Therein lies the duality of The Judas Kiss which zeroes in on two pivotal moments in Wilde's life. In the first, holed up at the Cadogan Hotel and facing arrest for gross indecency, he declines to flee to the continent. In the second, in penurious post-prison exile in Naples, he defies an ultimatum to abandon Bosie on the very day that Bosie proceeds to desert him.

Jason Cavanagh is Mockingbird Theatre's Associate Director as well as the Artistic Director of The Owl and the Pussycat and 5pound Theatre. He is a graduate of the National Theatre. Jason's theatre credits include: The Joy of Text, After Hamlet, The Unnammed; Sally The Musical; Pygmalion; The Goat or, Who is Sylvia; Rhinoceros; Cycology; The Woods, You, Dump Me, Romeo and Juliet, Wilde About Joyce, Macbeth, Collapse, The Tempest, Alternative Endings, Kiss Them all Soundly, The Rover, Away, The Dutch Courtesan, Ramsay Street Rejects, Admen, Blood Wedding at the MTC, Angels, The Lower Depths, Smut, All the News That's Fit To Print, Punch, Radio City and How I Learned To Drive for Mockingbird Theatre. Jason's The Blue Room, for 5pound Theatre, earned rave reviews as did his recent production, Noises Off, as part of 5pounds of repertory theatre.

Sir David Hare is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. Most notable for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for The Hours in 2002. His greatest successes on West End were Plenty, Racing Demon, Skylight and Amy's View. The four plays ran on Broadway between 1982 and 1999, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations and two Laurence Olivier Awards. Hare has also received a BAFTA, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the London Theatre Critics' Award. Hare is married to the French fashion designer Nicole Farhi.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet becoming one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance Of Being Earnest, is perhaps his best known satire on Victorian social mores; it was also to be the last published work Wilde was ever to write. Other notable works are: Salomé, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband as well as his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895 and released two yeas later. He left England the day after his release for the continent where he was to spend the last three years of his life in impoverished exile. Oscar Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on 30 November 1900.

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