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Dan Rebellato

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    • Complete List of Publications
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​Nicola Harrison in Fen (Photo: Paul Toeman)

Fen

​Nicola Harrison in Fen (Photo: Paul Toeman)

Hard to believe it, but Caryl Churchill’s Fen has never had a professional London production since its premiere in 1983. Consequently, though I’ve read and taught the play a number of times, I’ve never seen it. It may be my favourite unseen play.

But now I have - and in style. Ria Parry’s production at the Finborough is exquisitely judged. The multiple characters are played by six actors on a small traverse of earth, with a wooden bridge at one end and the battered cupboards of a Fenland home at the other.

The sure decisions here are about the reality of things. Onions in a crate, potatoes in a pail, stones on the earth. Fen is about a life lived in the materiality of things, from which the characters struggle to lift themselves - high on a tractor, elevated by money, lifted on stilts. The production caught that beautifully.

​

March 12, 2011 by Dan Rebellato.
  • March 12, 2011
  • Dan Rebellato
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Dan Rebellato

playwright, teacher, academic

 

You may be here because you’ve come across a book, or play, or article of mine and you want to know more. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. Maybe you are gathering ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack that will expose me for the charlatan that I am.  

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  • News
  • Spilled Ink
    • Complete List of Plays
    • 7 Ghosts
    • Cavalry
    • Chekhov in Hell
    • Dead Souls
    • Emily Rising
    • Here's What I Did With My Body One Day
    • Killer
    • Mile End
    • Negative Signs of Progress
    • My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye
    • Restless Dreams
    • Slow Air
    • Slow Beasts
    • Static
    • Theatremorphosis
    • You & Me
    • Zola: Blood, Sex & Money
    • Complete List of Publications
    • 1956 and All That
    • Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
    • Contemporary European Playwrights
    • Contemporary European Theatre Directors
    • Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009
    • No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We
    • On Churchill's Influences
    • Paris Commune
    • Playwriting
    • Sarah Kane before Blasted
    • Sarah Kane Documentary
    • The Suspect Culture Book
    • Theatre &
    • Theatre & Globalization
    • When We Talk of Horses
    • Writ Large
  • Stage Directions
  • Wilding Audio
  • Links
  • About
  • Contact

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