Stevie Martin on why you should go and see Seven Lears at Collingwood next week…

Collingwood College from 7-9 Dec @ 8PM sees one of the most exciting plays attempted this year by the Woodplayers…

Durham does a lot of theatre. It’s a fact. Unfortunately, with such a flourishing theatrical scene comes an overwhelming amount of acronyms: DULOG, DST, CTC, BTC, HCTC, DOE, DUP… OK, stopping now. But does an acronym (usually involving the letters ‘D’ or ‘T’) really make a great theatre company? Of course not, which is why the Collingwood Woodplayers have chosen to bypass all that irritating abbreviation and concentrate on producing some quality theatre coming at you on the 7th, 8th and 9th December.

Aside from the Assembly Rooms, there are so many other venues being used for theatrical endeavours that get overlooked by Bailey Inhabitors purely because they can’t be bothered to walk up the Hill. It’s either that or Bailey-Hill snobbery, but I think it’s safe to say the former is more probable. Durham21 recently spoke to Gareth Davies, the director of Howard Barker’s critically acclaimed Seven Lears, a play charting the progress of a young Lear up to the point where Shakespeare took over and someone ended up getting his eyes gouged out. Oh, and it’s being performed in Collingwood.

Gareth is, quite rightly, adamant that this shouldn’t put people off: ‘The fact that it’s not in the Assembly Rooms is quite a good thing: it means that people from Collingwood can just roll out of bed and they’re there, but I want people from outside the College to come and see it.’ Considering the quality of the publicity campaign, not to mention the interesting decision to stage such a radical piece of theatre, this shouldn’t pose a problem. Written in 1989, the play has been described by critics as ‘impossible to ignore’, with the playwright himself considered one of the major writers of European Theatre. Interestingly, in his home country, he is still relatively unknown; in the last three years there have been just four English productions of his plays.

Perhaps this is due to the language, which Gareth admits is ‘poetic, while sometimes just totally insane’, but either way, the Wood players are all up for tackling it. ‘Everybody involved is from Collingwood, which really gives the production a sense of unity… you don’t always get that when people are thrown together, but here there’s real camaraderie’, not to mention the fact that it certainly gives people who wouldn’t normally get involved with Durham theatre a platform to work from. Here, everyone gets an opportunity to get stuck in, regardless of whether you’re a member of DST or TDUADYSIIDT(The Durham University Amateur Dramatic Yet Sometimes Improvised Interpretive Dance Troupe), which can only be a good thing.

Stevie Martin

Seven Lears will be performed at Collingwood College from 7-9 Dec @ 8pm. Tickets are £4/£3.50 DST   (BOX OFFICE 07809 205426; p.s.brown@durham.ac.uk) So check out the facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=190381777121&ref=ts or visit the Woodplayers website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/collingwood.woodplayers for further details.