Royal Court Announces Listings For Wallace Shawn Season

The Royal Court Theatre will be screening two of Wallace Shawn's most acclaimed films, and staging readings of five of his plays, as part of its Wallace Shawn season.

The season, which begins this month, will also see revivals of his classic works The Fever and Aunt Dan and Lemon, and the world premiere of his new play Grasses of a Thousand Colours.

The first film to be screened will be the cult classic My Dinner With André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981), which stars Shawn - who also co-wrote the film - alongside André Gregory, as two friends who share lives and stories over dinner in New York. The second film will be Vanya on 42nd Street (dir. André Gregory and Louis Malle, 1994), an intimate and interpretive observation of a production of the play Uncle Vanya, with a cast that includes Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith and George Gaynes.

There will also be public rehearsed readings of Shawn's plays The Hotel Play, Our Late Night, A Thought In Three Parts, Marie and Bruce and The Designated Mourner. Tom Cairns will direct Our Late Night, Caryl Churchill will direct A Thought In Three Parts, Patsy Rodenburg will direct Marie and Bruce, and André Gregory will direct Shawn himself in The Designated Mourner.

Film Screenings

Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

Tickets £7.50, £6.50 concs

Sat 18 April, 4pm

My Dinner with André (released in 1981)

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, apparently playing themselves, share their lives over the course of an evening meal at a restaurant. Theatre director Gregory describes travelling the world in a desperate search for something beyond the confines of a bourgeois existence. Shawn wonders if Gregory is mentally disturbed and questions the value of his friend's anguished struggle.

Running time 1hr 50 mins

Sat 25 April, 4pm

Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)

An intimate, interpretive performance of the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, based on the English translation by David Mamet, staged and filmed entirely within the vacant shell of the then-abandoned Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street in New York. Directed by André Gregory and Louis Malle and featuring Wallace Shawn as Vanya and Julianne Moore as Yelena, the play is enacted in rehearsal style on a bare stage with the actors in street clothes.

Running time 2 hrs

Rehearsed Readings

Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

Tickets £8, £6 concs

Casting tba

Fri 5 June, 4pm

The Hotel Play (first performed in 1970)

A beleaguered desk clerk at a hotel in the tropics tries to placate, amuse and occasionally seduce the widely varied clientele. Comprised of a series of brief scenes, some bitingly satiric, some outlandishly bizarre, the play's raucous mood covers over the hotel's essentially dark and foreboding atmosphere.

Fri 12 June, 4pm

Our Late Night (1975)

Seven people negotiate the minefield of dating and mating at a party in which they talk at one another, over one another, and around one another until language becomes less a means of communication than a weapon in a brutal struggle.

Director Tom Cairns

Fri 19 June, 4pm

A Thought in Three Parts (1976)

Offering an unusual exploration of sex and desire, A Thought in Three Parts consists of Summer Evening, in which a young couple try to express their sexual feelings amidst the savagery of small talk; The Youth Hostel concerning five young travellers who can not resist saying or doing the first thing that comes to mind; and Mr Frivolous, in which a man eating his breakfast delivers a brief, dreamy monologue to a lost lover.

Director Caryl Churchill

Thu 25 June, 4pm

Marie and Bruce (1978)

Marie wants to leave Bruce. But when she confronts him, he goes limp. Sophisticated and highly original, this is a frank, comedic study of confusion and pain in a modern marriage.

Director Patsy Rodenberg

Fri 26 June, 3pm

The Designated Mourner (1997)

Howard and his daughter Judy are people of privilege at odds with their country's right-wing regime. Judy's husband Jack is shallow but amusing. As the regime becomes increasingly likely to try and silence even relatively quiet dissenters, the choices they make about how to live their lives become both grimly personal and unexpectedly entangled with questions of survival.

Cast includes Wallace Shawn

Director André Gregory

 

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