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DICKENS
50th Belfast Festival At Queen’s
DICKENS
50th Belfast Festival At Queen’s
Dr Leon Litvack & The Belfast Pickwick Players
For Charles Dickens Belfast was “a fine place with a rough people”.
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Date: Friday 19 October Time: 6.00pm Venue: Ulster Museum Tickets: £5
He thought of the city’s citizens -
“a better audience on the whole than Dublin; and the personal affection there was something overwhelming”.
A reading from the classic Oliver Twist is performed by exhibition curator and Dickens 2012 NI Festival Director, Dr Leon Litvack. Followed by a musical performance by Belfast Pickwick Players.
Festival celebrates this year’s bicentenary of Dickens’ birth, with a series of talks, performances and exhibitions commemorating this great man’s three visits to Belfast.
Ticket includes guided tour of the exhibition.
Dickens In The Dark
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Wireless Mystery Theatre – On the Air and digital sound artist Gus Leudar.
Robert Powell Dickens’ Villains Date: Time: Venue: Tickets:
Dates: Friday 26 October - Sunday 28 October Venue: Templemore Baths, Templemore Avenue Times: Each 20 minute story at; 5.40pm, 6.20pm & 6.50pm. Entire show at 8.00pm Tickets: Individual stories £5 Entire Show £10.00
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Sunday 28 October 8.00pm (doors 7.30pm) May Street Church, 23 May Street £10, £8 concession
Villains have always fascinated us. In most stories, villains provide the plot, and make the heroes and heroines interesting. Nobody knew this better than Charles Dickens. He was always a man of the theatre, a born actor, and, as every actor knows, an entertaining rogue is an infinitely better role than a dull hero! Although a writer from the Victorian era, Dickens’ work transcends his time, language and culture. He remains a massive contemporary influence throughout the world and his writings continue to inspire film, TV, art, literature, artists and academia. Robert Powell is a much-loved television and film actor, best known for the BAFTA-nominated title role in Zefferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and as the fictional secret agent Richard Hannay. His distinctive voice has become well known in advertisements and documentaries and he is also known for his roles in the medical drama, Holby City, and in the sitcom The Detectives.
Fringe Benefits Theatre Company presents
Nicholas Nickleby
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Adapted and directed by Sam McCready Dates: Thursday 25 October - Sunday 28 October Time: 7.30pm Matinee: Saturday 27 October 2.30pm Venue: Crescent Arts Centre Tickets: £12
The story of the eponymous hero, who with wit and resourcefulness defends those he loves against the insults and humiliations of the vicious schoolmaster Wackford Squeers and his family in Dotheboys Hall, one of the many Victorian boarding schools to which unwanted children were sent by their parents and largely forgotten. Sam McCready is a native Ulsterman, internationally known and respected for his sterling productions at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, and major theatres in the US.
On one of his trips to Belfast, Charles Dickens mysteriously disappeared, only to return two days later with a horse and carriage that he had bought for his daughter. Dickens in the Dark will seek to explore that mystery, as three unreliable tour guides lead the audience through the dark disused Victorian side of Templemore Avenue Swimming Baths, trying to piece together the evidence hidden in his writing. As the sonic landscape changes, from a train compartment, to a crowded courtroom, to an unfriendly hostel hallway, three of Dickens’ ghost stories - the famous The Signalman, A Trial for Murder and The Ghost in the Bridal Chamber - come to life. How did his experience of disappearing in Belfast influence their writing? In the darkness, the audience will have only the words, the sounds, and their imaginations to construct the terrifying stories. Produced with the full cooperation of the swimming baths board and Belfast City Council
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