Revolutionary Stages

People of Islington, people of Haringey, people even, possibly, of Peckham:, Comrades all. Welcome to Revolutionary Stages – the latest of Almeida Projects' collaborations with the students and teachers of City and Islington College.

Revolutionary Stages was Almeida Projects' second devised theatre collaboration with A-level Drama Students from City and Islington Sixth Form College.

In June 2006 we invited Directors Helen Eastman and Sarah Tipple, Lighting Designer Katharine Williams and Actor Curtis Jordan to work with 33 students aged 16 - 19 on a new devising project which ran alongside the Almeida's hugely successful production of Gorky's Enemies. The task? To create a new piece of non-naturalistic theatre that answered one very important question:

Can theatre change the course of history?

We asked the Almeida's artist collaborators and the students whether theatre can change the course of history. Their response, created as part of a theatre laboratory, was a practical and artistic investigation of the strength and importance of ideas and the power of the collective to effect change. 

At the beginning of the last century Maxim Gorky, poet and playwright, gave a voice and a face to the previously unheard and unseen "masses" of the Russian nation. He dramatised history as it was unfolding, capturing the spirit of uncertainty, fear and optimism. His play, Enemies, staged at the Almeida 100 years on (and for only the second time in the UK), shows the overlap of the end of an era and the beginning of the new.

Elsewhere in the same period, Meyerhold, Piscator and Brecht, among others, led a march to create new means of artistic production to respond to the new world in which they wanted to live.

The Revolutionary Stages project enabled us to share a moment in history, one of the invisible but significant events of which entire revolutions - political and artistic - are comprised.

During the period 1988-1989 a series of potentially world-changing events took place - a new generation of 33 artists was born. It is too soon to register the full impact on the world of these creative individuals’ life and works but this project marked the beginning. It was also an ending - the culmination of a 3-week journey working as an artistic collective with a view to creating provocative, challenging but above all inspiring theatre.