Tron Theatre's Associate Director for 2022-24, Joanna Bowman, will direct the first play of her tenure this Spring in our Changing House studio. The work she's chosen to stage is Ross Willis's bold, fantastical fairytale, Wolfie (4-13 May, Press Performance: Fri 5 May, 7.45pm), a spiralling odyssey of dizzying theatricality.
Something's not right. Children are being raised by animals. A mother is slowly sinking in the bath. The trees are left doing the paperwork. The air is filled with screams of children howling for help. And some twins want to tell you a story about how everything got so f*cked up.
Wolfie was Ross Willis's debut play and won Best Play at both the Writers' Guild Awards and the Off-West End Awards in 2020. It follows twins separated at birth, farmed out to foster parents unable to provide the care they need. Z (Leah Byrne) is placed with the Soggy Woman (a chemically unbalanced character who spends most of her time in the bath), growing into a clever but horribly deprived child desperately seeking maternal love; and A (Anna Russell-Martin) with Bony Man, who leaves her for dead in a forest, where she is rescued by a female wolf and raised as a feral child.
Joanna says of the play: 'The opening stage direction of Wolfie is 'this play should not be polite'. A journey through forests, food banks, and loads of movement, the story is one that demands to be told now. It's a howl of anger and a riot of colour, politically essential and brilliantly conceived. It's also really funny. What better invitation for a director and an audience?'
With an unconventional stage design by Alisa Kalyanova, lighting by Colin Grenfell and sound by Danny Krass, Wolfie is an irreverent look at life in and after the care system that asks who is truly responsible for society's most vulnerable children.
Running time approx. 1 hour 40 minutes + 20-minute interval
WOLFIE is produced by special arrangement with Alexandra Cory Berlin Associates.
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