productions
Click on a link below to display details of a production in the right-hand column of this page.
West End
Glyndebourne
Bach Festival Leipzig
Berliner Kammeroper
Aldeburgh/Almeida Opera
Radio
Brighton Theatre Collective
Community Opera
The Castle Wellingborough
Shaker Productions
Alarmist Theatre
- The School of Night
- Whose Crime Is It Anyway?
- The Bedbug (adaptation)
- The Assembly Women (adaptation)
Brighton Actors Workshop
Thumbscrew Theatre Company
The Bedbug
A perestroika adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's play by Stephen Plaice
In the 1990s, Prisypkin, a Russian Yuppie, is cryogenically frozen after a fire destroys his wedding. He is defrosted in a European superstate fifty years later.
Directed by Helena Uren
Designed by Anna Symes / Graham Evans
Moscow production designed by Matthew Miller
Cast: Ralf Higgins, Judith Hurley, Daniel Earl, Mim King, Kate Gisbourne, Allison Hudson
Première - The Pavilion Theatre, Brighton: February 1990
Edinburgh production: 20th August 1990
Moscow production: 5th September 1990
Press notices
' Stephen Plaice's bold and for the most part effective adaptation for
Alarmist Theatre transplants the first act to post-perestroika Russia in
1990, then has the hero, Prisypkin, waking up in the year 2040 with a grave
new dehumanised capitalist world in which the chief human right is to consume,
and romance is found only in the dictionary of obsolete terms.'
Mick Martin The Guardian
'Lively update, shot through with witty and topical one-liners and performed
by a fivesome that's young nifty and slick.. Alarmist's moving and memorable
seventh show looks good and feels good too. Laugh first, and think afterwards.'
City Limits
'Superb staging of updated satire. Mayakovsky would undoubtedly have approved.'
The Scotsman
' Alarmists cause laughter in capital theatres. Played to packed houses
in Moscow.'
Soviet Weekly