Sheffield University, Sheffield, England

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/drama

The Theatre Workshop at the University of Sheffield will be staging Howard Barker’s The Castle in the University’s Drama Studio for four nights on October 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th. The production will be directed by Steve Nicholson, Reader in 20th Century and Contemporary Theatre and Director of Drama within the University’s School of English, who is currently working with The Wrestling School as an academic advisor on the ‘21 for 21 project’. The cast will include semi-professional actors as well as current students from the University, and members of The Wrestling School will be contributing to the rehearsal process.
The Castle is a huge and epic play, first staged by the RSC in 1985 with a cast which included Ian McDiarmid and Harriet Walter. It is one of the great plays of the decade, written in a typically powerful and poetic Barkerian language, and containing some extraordinary visual images. Loosely set in the Middle Ages, a Knight returns home from the Crusades with his retainer and a brilliant Arab engineer as his prisoner. He finds a world that has changed, and sets about re-imposing order onto the chaos, and constructing an ever-expanding Castle to repel his future enemies…