| The Kitchen | NIDA |
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A biting social satire that will leave you hungry and laughing...
Sir Arnold Wesker’s epic play The Kitchen is a piece of social realism loosely based on his own personal experience as a pastry chef. First produced in 1959 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, The Kitchen was recently named as one of the most important and influential English plays of the 20th Century. It has been performed throughout the world, but surprisingly never in Australia.
THE KITCHEN is a satiric portrait of a world which has its own unique hierarchy and limitations depicting a diverse group of cooks and waitresses operating as slaves to a giant machine – The Kitchen. All the characters are subject to the machine of capitalism, as exemplified by the ever-humming kitchen. How people behave is influenced by the machine.
Originally, the play reflected the social and racial tensions in London in the late 1950s: A London that still carried the visible (and invisible) scars of WWII. The British Empire was a thing of the past but old wounds and the mixture of races and cultures remained.
Whilst Socialism today is often regarded as a dirty word and an old fashioned concept, nevertheless the humanist message of the great social realists remains as pertinent and as relevant as ever. Hard earned values are taken for granted - e.g. workers rights, female suffrage, anti-discrimination laws. The prophetic visions of Berthold Brecht (Baal, In the Jungle of the Cities, The Threepenny Opera), George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and even Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and Charles Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ all denounced capitalism and industrialism as robbing the human soul of its capacity to hope and dream.
This production by NIDA 2nd year students is set in contemporary Sydney; the range of characters roughly reflecting the ‘ethnic’ mix of contemporary Australia.
NIDA presents 2ND YEAR ACTING STUDENTS in
THE KITCHEN
by Arnold Wesker
Directed by Tony Knight
Venue: Parade Theatre | 215 Anzac Parade, Kensington
Season: 25 – 30 September
Times: Thursday 25, Friday 26, Saturday 27, Monday 29 &Tuesday 30 September at 7.30pm
Prices: Adults $25; Concession $15
Bookings: www.ticketek.com.au or phone 1300 795 012
Info: www.nida.edu.au
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Saturday, 10 January 2009
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