European Premere of POWER OF SAIL Comes to the Menier Chocolate Factory Next Month

With its critically acclaimed production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Pacific Overtures running at the venue, the Menier Chocolate Factory has announced the European première of Paul Grellong’s Power of Sail. Dominic Dromgoole returns to the company, after the success of last year’s Marjorie Prime, to direct.

This production - co-produced with Daryl Roth who previously collaborated with the Menier on the critically acclaimed production of Indecent - opens on 28 March, with previews from the 20 March, and runs until 18 May.

All hell breaks loose when Harvard professor Charles Nichols invites a contentious white nationalist to his yearly symposium. His colleagues are very concerned about how this will affect both his and the University’s reputation; his students are vociferously protesting.  However, Charles refuses to budge. Is there another agenda?

Penned by Paul Grellong, whose television credits include The Boys and Law & Order: SVU, this moral thriller investigates the thin line between hate and freedom of speech - who bears the ultimate cost?  This European première, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, promises to be one of the most talked-about plays of the year.

Paul Grellong’s other plays include Manuscript, produced by Daryl Roth at the Daryl Roth Theatre, which has since been performed internationally; Radio Free Emerson (winner of the Elliot Norton Award from the Boston Theater Critics Association for Outstanding New Script), which was commissioned and produced by Rhode Island's Gamm Theatre. His plays have been read and workshopped at Center Theatre Group, MCC, Trinity Repertory Company, Symphony Space, Echo Theater Company, and the Cape Cod Theatre Project. His television credits include The Boys, Scorpion, Revolution, and Law & Order: SVU. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an alumnus of the Playwrights Union.

Dominic Dromgoole returns to the Menier to direct – he previously directed Marjorie Prime for the company. He launched a new theatre company, Classic Spring, which produced a year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde in 2017/18 directing the first play in the season, A Woman of No Importance, at the Vaudeville Theatre. Dromgoole was Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 2006 to 2016. In that time the Globe grew into an international theatre of progressive ambition and radical scope. Amongst other projects, he created a UK-wide touring operation and grew this touring internationally, culminating in a two-year tour of Hamlet which travelled to every country in the world. In 2012, he directed the Globe to Globe Festival, which hosted companies from 37 different countries. He was previously Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre – during his tenure between 1990-1996 he nurtured upcoming talents by premiering 65 new plays from a host of now influential writers such as Billy Roche, Irvine Welsh and Naomi Wallace. He then moved onto the Oxford Stage Company which he ran from 1999 to 2005. He launched a new film company, Open Palm Films, and made his first feature, Making Noise Quietly, in the summer of 2016.  The film, released by an adaptation of Robert Holman’s play of the same name, starred Deborah Findlay, Barbara Marten, Trystan Gravelle and Matthew Tennyson, and was released by Verve in 2019. He is  the author of the recently published Astonish Me! First Nights That Changed the World as well as Hamlet: Globe to Globe,The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting and Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, which won the inaugural Sheridan Morley award.

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