Rehearsed reading of Colin Teevan’s The Seven Pomegranate Seeds
Cast members include Jemma Redgrave, Daisy Lewis, Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Hannah Silva
Wednesday 11 June, 5pm
B01, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1
On Wednesday 11 June at 5pm, renowned playwright Colin Teevan’s monologue cycle The Seven Pomegranate Seeds will be performed in Birkbeck's Clore Management Centre. Cast members include Jemma Redgrave, Daisy Lewis, Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Hannah Silva.
Teevan describes the work as “the result of a long conversation between Euripides and me”, and it grew out of his series of monologues for men Missing Persons; Roy Keane and Other Tragedies.
The seven monologues of The Seven Pomegranate Seeds are all based on Euripidean sources dealing with mothers and children. Teevan’s work begins from the hypothesis that the unhappy endings which the majority of Euripides’ female characters met stemmed from a male anxiety caused by women’s exclusive access to the knowledge of what it is to lose a child that you have borne; and therefore to fully grasp the tragedy of war, exile and death.
Teevan says: “Euripides’ work resonated for me in a very contemporary way, in part due to the sheer number of missing or dead children. His extant oeuvre reads almost as one single piece of perpetual loss. And we seemed in 2006, and continue to seem now, to be a society living in an age of anxiety about children. From the Moor’s murders and the Bulger case, to the Louise Woodward case and the constant revelations of child abuse that were then emerging almost weekly in my native Ireland that formed the sociological back drop to these stories; I knew that this discourse about children was important, that it said something about us and the world we lived in. And to think about it I had this conversation with Euripides.”
The performance will inaugurate Teevan’s newly awarded Professorship in Playwriting and Screenwriting in Birkbeck's Department of English and Humanities, where he has taught for six years. It is produced by Sophie Larsmon, a freelance theatre producer and alumna of Birkbeck’s MA Creative Producing. Each of the seven monologues will be directed by a student from Birkbeck’s MFA Theatre Directing.
View a recording of the event.