DANCE GROUP PUTS SPIN ON DICKENS’ TALE
AFTER previously adapting Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, dance theatre company Lost Dog now turn their attention to another classic, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
Famed for its opening sentence – ‘‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...’’ – the story is set against the backdrop of the French Revolution.
“I first read it when I was 18 and loved it,” says Lost Dog’s artistic director, Ben Duke. “I think it was a book that appealed to my late teenage sense of a relatively binary world.”
The story begins with orphan Lucie Manette travelling from to Paris after discovering her deceased father is actually alive. She goes on to marry a Frenchman, who later faces the guillotine.
“I thought about it as a basis for a piece probably about five years ago, but dismissed it as something with too much story,“Ben continues of the heavily-plotted tale. “However, I kept thinking about it and now here we all are trying to make it happen.”
Believing Dickens to have underwritten Lucie, Lost Dog have taken a typically radical approach to the tale.
“In our production we imagine an alternative future for Dickens’ characters and they are looking back and trying to make sense of it,” says Ben, who also employs camera and film techniques, as well as text.
“Text is the main storytelling vehicle; text is what allows us to set up situations and develop characters. It is what we will use to build the framework and the other elements – the film, and the movement – will hang on this.”
Lost Dog’s A Tale Of Two Cities runs from February 16-18 at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry. Details: www. warwickartscentre.co.uk