The Park
Theatre
Description
Description
Der Park, by the great German playwright Botho Strauss, is a five act drama that explores themes and characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a contemporary setting. In a way it is the dark side of Shakespeare’s play, the dream turned into an inescapable nightmare. The story centers around Oberon and Titania, who, hoping to rekindle the dynamic force of love and harmony on earth, visit the night-life in a city park, the haunt of social outsiders and the young. However, their ‘magic’ powers fail as they themselves mingle with humankind and merge with reality. Eventually they become mortal and join in the moral maze of human relationships. Like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream it largely plays over the span of the full moon’s waxing and waning (four nights), the fabled period when ‘lovers turn to lunatics’.
Botho Strauss’ play, although modern in its setting, retains magical and mythological elements that both frame and disrupt the text principally through the characters of Oberon (King of the Fairies), Titania (Queen and Goddess of the Moon) and Cyprian (a kind of amalgam of Puck and Daedalus – Father of Icarus, who created the Labyrinth). In this way he reminds us that behind both plays are the myths of ancient Greece pertaining to the Minotaur and Pasiphaë, the tragic woman who was cursed with love-lust for a bull. This is of course transposed by Shakespeare into the comedy of Titania falling in love with an Ass but in The Park is retained in its original form as befits a postmodern drama in which layers of the past, of history and memory, are unpeeled in the complex nuances of human behaviour
Translator：Jessica Yeung
Director：Ceri Sherlock
Producer：Tang Shu Wing
Cast：Academy Drama Students
Stage Manager：Chong Hiu Ting
Deputy Stage Manager：Mandy Mak
Production Manager：Frank Yeung
Set Designer：Bill Haycock (Production Designer); Jan Wong (Set Design Associate)
Lighting Designer：Leo Cheung
Sound Designer：Maj Chan; Jaycee Kwok Yu Kit; Leung Po Wing; Neville Li Man Chun
Costume Designer：Bill Haycock (Production Designer); Jackie Lam (Costume Design Associate)
Note：This event record is compiled from "Hong Kong Drama Yearbook 2011" published by International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong).
Info
$55
$100
Indoor
Local
