Voltaire's CANDIDE At Greenwich Playhouse Opens 4/7

Voltaire’s Candide (British première of a new/extended adaptation) is adapted and performed by Prentis Hancock. The show will be directed by Brian Cummins and David Roylance and will be presented by Worldzend.

Candide will be performed at the Greenwich Playhouse (Greenhouse Station Forecourt, 189 Greenwich High Road, London SE10 8JA) from 7th-26th April 2009. Tuesday-Saturday performances will be at 8:00 pm and Sunday performances will be at 4:00 pm. Tickets cost £11.00, £9.00 (concession). For box office information phone: 020-8858 9256 or email: boxoffice@galleontheatre.co.uk.

Written exactly 250 years ago, by the leading light of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s loved and most-read Candide or Optimism remains a winner. When it was secretly published, Candide became an overnight success. Taking as his model, Leibniz’s treatise Optimism, Voltaire explodes the thesis that the world is the ‘very best’ that God can make it. This ‘philosophy’ is epitomised in the character of Master Pangloss and his famous assertions that ‘All is for the best … in the best of possible worlds’. 

Remaining true to the text, Hancock portrays Voltaire as storyteller and through his naïve, young hero Candide’s adventures and mishaps, pokes fun at religion and theologians, governments and armies, philosophies and philosophers. He spares no-one, not the Church, not clerics, not Jews; neither Jesuits nor Moslems. As he cleverly shreds the 'optimist’ viewpoint of the earlier philosopher, nothing is safe from his forensic gaze in this eye-popping tale, A savage, satirical lampoon at the time of writing, many of these themes remain as valid today as when they were written.

Voltaire's Candide argues that, in the real world 's*** happens' and, in reality, all is not necessarily for the best. The author challenges the superstitious blind faith and wishful thinking which Pangloss [and by extension the clerics and Church of the time] had taught his hero. 

Prentis Hancock once again joins forces with David Roylance and Brian Cummins as they continue to tackle contemporary issues using classic text from old testaments.

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