Vinegar Tom

Vingegar tom is the play we will be performing by Caryl Churchill.

The play tells the story of Alice, who is in her twenties and living in a small village. Alice and her mother Joan are accused of witchcraft after an incident with their neighbours results in several mishaps upon their neighbours farm - supposedly the result of Joan's "witchcraft". It is later implied that Vinegar Tom, Joan's cat, may have been behind it all. The plot includes much witchcraft, some slating of the Christian faith at that time, and the clear discrimination of women. It was written at the height of the second feminist movement in the 20th Century. Churchill, a highly influential feminist writer shows just how much control men have over society, how women have only ever been classed as good for producing children in the past. All the songs are set in present day, and all reflect in one way or another, the discrimination of women/men's control of society. Betty, one of the plays characters is classed as mad or ill purely because she does not want to marry. The play also outlines society's rejection of people with differences.

I think this will be really interesting to work with as femism is really exciting thing to perform.

Threepenny opera using it in class

In class we have been doing Brecht workshops on how we can perform these pieces and different ways to do so. So for Threepenny we tried only using our voices to create the atmosphere we wanted!

Threepenny opera

This play is wrote by Brecht,

The Threepenny Opera proclaims itself "an opera for beggars," and it was in fact an attempt both to satirize traditional opera and operetta and to create a new kind of musical theater based on the theories of two young German artists, composer Kurt Weill and poet-playwright Bert Brecht. The show opens with a mock-Baroque overture, a nod to Threepenny's source, The Beggar's Opera, a brilliantly successful parody of Handel's operas written by John Gay in 1728. In a brief prologue following the overture, a shabby figure comes onstage with a barrel organ and launches into a song chronicling the crimes of the notorious bandit and womanizer Macheath, "Mack the Knife." The setting is a fair in Soho (London), just before Queen Victoria's coronation.