“a theatrical puzzle of time and place, one saturated in geometry, conducted in sound.”
In the 1950s French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet innovated a manner of storytelling focused purely on a drama’s inanimate aspects and on its incidental components. His stories spell out the habits and patterns of people: what they hold, where they sit and how they touch. Robbe-Grillet’s breakthrough novel, Jealousy (1957), repeatedly visits an assortment of compact scenes—each within the same day-and-a-half window—on adjacent plantations in an undisclosed location. From this place, whose surface we explore in aurally-discernible routes and patterns, comes a theatrical puzzle. The sum of these descriptions leads the story’s narrator, a man brought to a standstill by jealousy, to suspect an infidelity between his wife and their neighbour. What’s missing is the character whose very name contains an ellipse—three dots. We know her only as A…
Plantation A . . . an experimental sonic theatre work by composer Edward Jessen, will be presented by London-based Phaedra Ensemble with Polish soprano Anna Pych as part of Arcola Theatre’s 2024 Grimeborn Festival. It is being developed with Arnolfini, Bristol and with 2019 Arnolfini City Fellow, movement artist Holly Thomas. The project has been made possible with funding from Arts Council England, PRS Foundation, Hinrichsen Foundation and from Trinity Laban Conservatoire.
This production is offering £1 seats to our blind and visually impaired audiences. If you would like to book these seats, please call our box office on 020 7503 1646. You will be seated in row B of the stalls, unless requested otherwise.
