When announcing the 2019/20 season at the Royal Lyceum, David Greig said: “With this season I want to throw the doors of The Lyceum wide open and welcome everyone in Edinburgh to a season long feast of music, story, magic and myth.”
In September the season opens with Shakespeare’s achingly beautiful tale of love and belonging, Twelfth Night.
In Wils Wilson’s playful music-filled production there is the folk music and psychedelia of the 1960s, a time when the boundaries between gender and desire, play-acting and truth were still blurred. It’s a play which revels in the possibilities of a world turned upside down but which, in the gloriously sad creation of Malvolio, also shows us the yearning pain of the conventional man who finds himself out of time.
Next the theatre presents a classic tale of hidden love, Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand in the wonderful Scots version by Edwin Morgan. Greig said : “Cyrano is one of my favourite stories. I suppose that’s hardly surprising since Cyrano is the story of the seductive power of words – which writer wouldn’t love it? In Morgan’s version it becomes a joyous exploration of hidden desire played out by a big Scottish company on an epic scale. The show will be directed by Dominic Hill and co-produced by The National Theatre of Scotland and Citizens Theatre.”
For Christmas there is a return to fantasy with Wendy and Peter Pan, Ella Hickson’s delightful re-telling of Peter Pan in which the imagination of a young girl turns the simple contents of a Victorian nursery into the extraordinary world of Neverland, where she meets and spars with the eternal child at its centre – Peter Pan.
‘Death’, said Peter Pan, would be ‘an awfully big adventure.’
The autumn and winter season at the Lyceum is going to be a bit of an adventure too for audience goers.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
