UBC’s 2016/17 theatre season boasts an exciting string of productions with overarching themes all challenging the norm.
The season will commence with Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which has “challenged contemporary Elizabethan morality,” according to UBC Theatre and Film Department Head Stephen Heatley.
“The first show of every season is dedicated to this year's cohort of 12 students in their last year of BFA, and almost every year the chosen playwright is Shakespeare,” said Seamus Fera, the fifth-year BFA student playing Mortimer in Edward II. “You don’t get a lot of Marlowe; it will be a nice challenge for us to delve into a play that’s not that well-known but is also very prevalent to our society right now.” The play includes topics ranging from homosexual relationships to kings being overthrown by barons.
Next up is Samuel Beckett’s Beckett 16, which is a fundraising performance that benefits the Peter Loeffler Student Prize and also involves theatre alumni.
Love and Information, by Caryl Churchill involves “50 self-contained scenes that are all thematically linked through love and or information,” says MFA Candidate Lauren Taylor, who is the director of this play. “I think love and information are two major driving forces in our lives, and the play looks at where and how those driving forces connect.”
She expresses that Churchill is interested in looking at moments where people have to negotiate what it means to be human within different roles of power. Taylor points out a quote by the playwright herself that gives insight into her interest in exploring the human condition through her work: “We need to find new questions, which may help us answer the old ones, or make them unimportant and this means new subjects and new form.”
Led by Professor Tom Scholte, the annual Naked Cinema III will bring students from the Department of Theatre and Film together to make a feature film rooted in the philosophy of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 Manifesto.
To end the season, audiences will be treated to Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs. First produced in 1968 during the time of the Quiet Revolution that was happening in Quebec, the play has since made a profound impact on Quebec culture and theatre.
Fera reminds us that “theatre is about making a change and about relaying some message to the audience, whether it be political or just for fun.”