made possible entirely through the generous gift of

Judith Harris in honour of Tony Woolfson’s 60th birthday

 

The Associate Artist Program will allow Necessary Angel to invite visionary theatre artists to work with the company to create theatrical works of lasting importance that we hope to tour extensively both nationally and internationally.

 

Our first associate is the acclaimed Scottish director, Graham McLaren, who we met when we were touring our production of Half Life to the UK.  Graham is best known to Toronto audiences for his Dora-award winning production of Medea with Theatre Babel that played at the World Stage a few years ago. Graham has traveled his work around the globe to great acclaim and we are thrilled to be working with him on a radicalized and visceral version of Hamlet, perhaps the greatest play in the canon. We will workshop the play in Toronto with some of Canada’s finest actors and have four sneak preview performances at Buddies in Bad Times theatre on November 20-23, 2008. After the conclusion of Hamlet, it is our intention to create over the course of a couple of years something from the Greek canon, and commission one of Canada’s great poets and classicists to do the translation/adaptation, again with Graham directing and designing.

 

Our second associate is the award-wining Montreal director Brigitte Haentjens. Brigitte is a fearless creator of great distinction who is extremely well known in Quebec but not that well known in English Canada. We aim to rectify this. Brigitte creates highly rigorous and exact work and is equally at home working at scale and on more intimate chamber pieces. Last season she created a brilliant production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted with the great, internationally renowned and much loved Quebec actor, Roy Dupuis. Last year Brigitte was awarded the Siminovitch Prize, the largest and most prestigious national theatre prize in Canada. We are currently in discussions with Brigitte as to what she will create for Necessary Angel.

 

We have yet to decide on our third associate. It may be another international artist. We hope to create four works from three associates over the course of four to five years.