Focus: The Arches
| Most theatre takes its audience on a journey. We start at one place and, at the end of the play, we arrive somewhere else. Sometimes the journey goes in the opposite direction – as with Arches Theatre Company’s most recent production – Harold Pinter’s 'Betrayal' – starting at the end of an affair and ending at the beginning. |
 |
 |
For all these theatrical experiences, the audience goes on a voyage of the mind and remains physically in the one place to watch events unfold. In promenade theatre, however, it is possible to take the audience on a literal journey. In a building like The Arches, with its labyrinth of tunnels, corridors, and hidden spaces, the environment is perfectly suited for theatre on the move.
The Arches' first promenade show was staged shortly after they had established the venue. Metropolis, The Theatre Cut, was adapted from Fritz Lang’s classic expressionist silent movie. It involved a cast of nearly a hundred professional actors and volunteers and the whole upper floor of the building was transformed into a variety of settings. Each arch provided a different environment for the audience to visit – The Garden of Delight, The House of Sin, Maria’s secret cave and so on.
| The productions that followed such as Caligari, The Devils, The End Part One, Horses, Horses, Running in All Directions and most recently Beowulf, have been on a smaller scale than Metropolis. |
|
 |
Scheduling of The Arches' other events – concerts, club nights, functions, festivals - restricted the use of the whole building for a long theatre run.
Last year, Andy Arnold, The Arches' artistic director, started to stage work in smaller basement spaces in order to provide the promenade experience, albeit to smaller groups of audiences. The results have been very liberating. Beckett Two, The Basement Tapes, took a maximum audience of 50 at a time. It journeyed through installations to derelict basement spaces to witness Kay Gallie’s Rockaby, then round another corner and up a stair, to view Krapp’s Last Tape. This production was swiftly followed by I Confess – 20 performers confessing one to one with 20 audience members – in basement corridors, dressing rooms, recesses, and doorways.
Now, in The Arches' 15th year, it is staging a promenade show which harks back to the aspirations of that first large scale show, but which also incorporates the magic of their newly used underground corridor spaces.
 |
|
With a cast of 80, Inferno, adapted from Dante’s epic poem, will be staged throughout the whole of the Arches. It will take three small groups of audiences each night, down to the depths of Hell, first through scenarios in the main arches, then down stairs to dark spaces where groups of sinners will be confronted at every turn. |
Inferno will be spoken through the texts of Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampit and many other poets and writers. Thus it will hopefully combine the core of theatre – language – with a visceral, and at times disturbing, physical journey around the amazing building.
Inferno runs from 10 to 24 March 2006. Visit The Arches website for details. |