With the annual Tricycle Takeover due to open next month, Artistic Director Indhu Rubasingham has announced the company’s forthcoming work ahead of the reopening of the building in spring 2018.
Tricycle Takeover returns in April for its 4th year with its most ambitious programme to date. Six venues across the borough will host more than 25 free events, screenings, performances and masterclasses across a 13 day period. During the Takeover, young people from across London will be invited to get involved as audiences, workshop participants and performers.
Headlining Takeover 2017 are six new plays – The Invisible Boy; 24 Hours; Almost, But Not Quite; We Too, Are Giants; Buried; and Mission Improbable – written for six new theatre companies exploring themes of community, the expectations of society and coming of age. Eleven professional playwrights and directors from across the industry have been leading the projects, including names such as Tinuke Craig, Chino Odimba and Somalia Seaton.
This summer, Mikel Murfi returns with his production of The Man In The Woman’s Shoes, which was a sell-out success at the Tricycle last year, playing in rep with his brand new play, I Hear You And Rejoice, in the Tricycle cinema space.
In the latter, Pat Farnon, a cobbler and all-round contented man, marries the redoubtable Kitsy Rainey. It’s a match made in heaven, in more ways than one. Written and performed by Mikel Murfi, I Hear You And Rejoice is a tender and joy filled account of a most unlikely marriage.
The Tricycle cinema space will also play host to Inua Ellams’ An Evening With An Immigrant this summer, which sees Award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams returns to the venue.
Littered with poems, stories and anecdotes, Inua will tell his ridiculous, fantastic, poignant immigrant-story of escaping fundamentalist Islam, directing an arts festival at his college in Dublin, performing solo shows at the National Theatre, and drinking wine with the Queen of England, all the while without a country to belong to or place to call home.
In a first for the company, the Tricycle Theatre will partner with the National Theatre in a co-production of the world première of The Great Wave, an epic play set in Japan and North Korea, which won its playwright, Francis Turnly, the Catherine Johnson Award (2016).
On a dark and stormy night two sisters, Hanako and Reiko, are swept away by a gigantic wave. Reiko survives while Hanako is, seemingly, lost to the sea. Their mother, however, can’t shake the feeling her daughter is still alive… Rubasingham directs the production, which opens at the National Theatre in Spring 2018.
On other shores, Rubasingham’s Olivier Award-winning production of Moira Buffini’s hit play Handbagged will receive its US première at the Round House Theatre in Washington DC as part of the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival – the world’s largest festival dedicated to new work by women.
For more information about the season of work, please visit the venue’s website.