DVDs

Mind Maps

Publications

Macbeth (2017)

The Odyssey (2016)

Woyzeck (2015)

Antigone (2014)

Everyman (2013)

Medea (2012)

The Trial (2011)

Dr Faustus (2010)

There are three ways to order:

• You can print our mail order form and send it with your cheque.
• If you need us to send you an invoice to raise payment, use the email form (you can also print this).
• Buy online right now using PayPal.

There are three ways to order:

• You can print our mail order form and send it with your cheque.
• If you need us to send you an invoice to raise payment, use the email form (you can also print this).
• Buy online right now using PayPal.

Why we made the DVDs

Splendid Productions is primarily a touring theatre and education company, and we particularly enjoy the unique experience of playing to a real live audience and interacting with them in our workshops.

However, over the years, we have had an increasing number of clients requesting a record of the productions for students to refer to, and of course a lot of potential audiences we were unable to fit into our tours, and so we found a way to commit some of our work to disc.

About the Productions

All of our productions were designed to travel the country in a small car, set up and taken down in half an hour, often twice a day. For this reason, they have a cast of three and the most rudimentary of sets. But luckily, the limitations of your bootspace does not restrict the reach of your imagination!

Our approach to theatre, like many of our favourite practitioners, is that it is created more by the actors and the audience than by the lights and the scenery. Both of these productions are great examples of what committed performers can achieve with the barest of essentials.

About the Adaptations

To Splendid, the script is just the starting point for a devising process that aims to create an entertaining and thought-provoking piece that is relevant to the audience that year, that day. We specialise in reinterpreting classic texts to place the fundamental human questions at the heart of the production.

We use a ‘Brechtian’ structure that breaks the action into episodes, using signs, songs and direct address to engage the audience’s minds as well as their attention. It also allows us to break up the traditional narrative in interesting ways.

'Antigone' blends Sophocles' chorus with a chorus of clowns who have organised a party to celebrate the end of the war. The story of Antigone's conflict with her uncle, King Creon, takes place between party games inspired by the play, including 'Ten Seconds of Freedom', 'Who is the Most Powerful Person in the Room?', and 'Throw the Boulders at the Body'.

'Everyman' interleaves adapted scenes from the orginal text with newly devised scenes inspired by lazzi from Commedia dell'Arte, exploring experiences common to every kind of person, expanding the highly Christian, medieval worldview of the morality play into something warm and involving for all humans.

'Medea' tells both the story of Medea and the legend of Jason and the Argonauts in parallel, contrasting the idealised romance at the beginning of a relationship with the bitter reality of the end - an experience familar to anyone who has been in love (although killing your kids might be taking it a bit far...). We also explore what it takes to become a legend, and why Jason and Medea are remembered so differently.

For 'The Trial', our intention was to give the audience an experience that parallelled that of Josef K, and so our performance begins as soon as the audience enter the auditorium. As brisk and efficient clerks, the cast begin to 'process' the audience according to an unknown set of criteria, rewarding and castigating individuals in an arbitrary manner. But how arbitrary is it? And how compliant can an audience be made to be?

In ‘Dr Faustus’, we interleave the scenes from the play with newly devised episodes, each dealing with a different ‘Deadly Sin’, and posing the question ‘what’s your sin?’.

‘Woyzeck’ takes the idea to its logical conclusion by presenting the episodes in a seemingly random order, and even playing the murder scene three times, asking the audience how their judgement changes as the whole story is revealed.

The scripts are all adapted freely from the original text, but the action and intention remains true to the source material. In the case of ‘Dr Faustus’, much of the language has been updated, but many of Marlowe’s lines have been incorporated into the adaptation. Mephistopheles, for example, uses only speeches from the original text.

We limit our plays to a running time of one hour, which makes them focussed and punchy, but this does mean substantial cuts and reinterpretations of scenes. These are by no means faithful presentations of set texts, but we believe they are witty and vibrant examples of living, contemporary theatre. Now trapped forever on DVD...