Rehearsals Now Underway for National Theatre Wales' ILIAD

A cast of ten will play the Greeks and Trojans, alongside local Llanelli teenagers as the unruly Greek gods - impulsive, vengeful, sex-mad and status-obsessed.

Tickets are now on sale. The production will be four parts, performed individually on weeknights, and in two marathon performances - one all day, and one overnight. The production will be performed in the Ffwrnes theatre in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire (21 SEP - 3 OCT 2015)

"In the beginning there was no Beginning,
And in the end, no End..."

Cast: Claire Cage, Rosa Casado, Daniel Hawksford, Ffion Jones, Richard Huw Morgan, Guy Lewis, Richard Lynch, John Rowley, Melanie Walters and Llion Williams

Teenage gods: Jacob Brown, Connor Charles, Madison Ellery, Scott Gutteridge, Lucy Havard, Harry Lynn, Ella Peel, Carmen Smith, Joseph Stockton and Maddison Eve Thomas

Renowned theatre-makers Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, celebrated for their recent, large-scale interpretations of Aeschylus' The Persians and Shakespeare's and Brecht's Coriolan/us with National Theatre Wales, will bring their trademark vision to this multimedia staging of Christopher Logue's filmic poem War Music, derived from Homer's account of the last years of the Trojan War.

The audience will be cast into a world both ancient and modern, a world created by a group of eminent Welsh actors, a troupe of teenage gods, a stage shaped around them, and vast cinematic landscapes. Each of the four parts can be viewed individually, while bolder audience members can choose to see all four in one of two marathon performances - either all day or overnight.

Classic Greek, epic storytelling meets box-set theatre.

The cast will include six narrators (Claire Cage, Daniel Hawksford, Guy Lewis, Richard Lynch, Melanie Walters and Llion Williams), four constructors who will reshape the set throughout the performances and 10 local teenagers as the gods.

Images available here: https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/news/media/iliad/publicity

Mike Brookes is an award-winning artist, director and designer. He co-founded the performance collective Pearson/Brookes with Mike Pearson in 1997. Since 2005, his collaborative art work with Spanish artist Rosa Casado has produced live art and gallery works across a range of media; their work together having been widely commissioned and presented across Europe, Asia, Australasia, South America, and USA. Other collaborators include Quarantine and Untitled Projects. In 2007, he was appointed Research Fellow within Aberystwyth University.

Mike Pearson trained as an archaeologist. He was a member of R.A.T. Theatre (1972-73) and an artistic director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973-80) and Brith Gof (1981-97). He currently makes performance as a solo artist; with Mike Brookes in Pearson/Brookes and for National Theatre Wales. Mike is author of Theatre/Archaeology (2001); In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (2006); Site-Specific Performance (2010); The Mickery Theater: An Imperfect Archaeology (2011); and Marking Time: Performance, Archaeology and the City (2013). He was Professor of Performance Studies, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University (1999-2014).

Christopher Logue was a poet, screenwriter, actor and playwright. Born in Portsmouth in 1926 he served briefly in the Black Watch during and immediately after the Second World War, before spending sixteen months in a military prison. In 1952 he went to Paris where he worked on Merlin, the magazine which published Beckett. He funded his own poetry by writing pornography under the name Count Palmiro Vicarion. Back in London in the '60s he wrote plays for the Royal Court, scripts for Ken Russell, including Savage Messiah and songs for Peter Cook's Establishment Club. He acted in several films, including Russell's The Devils and went to prison again in 1961 with Bertrand Russell and others for his support of CND. On his release he began his 'True Stories' column for Private Eye. He was responsible for some of the first poetry posters and was a life-long advocate of performance verse. In 1959 he recorded Red Bird, with the musician and composer Tony Kinsey, a combination of jazz with Logue's versions of poems by Pablo Neruda. His retelling of the Iliad, begun in 1959 and published in several volumes which came to be known collectively as War Music, is his best-known work. He had no Greek and based his work on literal translations, many provided by Donald Carne-Ross, who commissioned the first part of War Music for the Third Programme (Radio Three). He recorded and performed it often, notably with Alan Howard. War Music remained incomplete at his death, in 2011.

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