NT : What's On : Productions : Arden City
Arden City
by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Rosie and Sally are two cousins who escape from home after difficulties with Sally’s father. Rosie dresses as a boy for safety and the girls find their way to an allotment. Orlando, who also has to flee because his brother Oliver wants him killed, finds his way to the allotment with Adam, his younger friend. A modern retelling of As You Like It: a story about love, identity and freedom.
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays include, at the Royal Court, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good (also on Broadway, 1988 Olivier Play of the Year Award and the 1991 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play); Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Susan Smith Blackburn, Writers’ Guild and London Critics’ Circle awards), The Break of Day (also on tour), Credible Witness, and Divine Intervention (also BBC Radio 3). Elsewhere: The Love of the Nightingale at the RSC (Eileen Anderson Central TV Drama Award); After Darwin at Hampstead Theatre Club; The Ash Girl at Birmingham Rep; Galileo’s Daughter for the Peter Hall Company at the Bath Theatre Festival; and New Anatomies at the ICA. For Radio 3: Dianeira. The most recent of her many translations and adaptations is Gabriela Preissova’s Jenufa at the Arcola Theatre.
Performed by Daydreamer Youth Theatre, Watford
The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking.
Arden City finished on: 5 July 2008
