His Dark Materials (NHB Modern Plays)

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He replied: "My response to that was to ask the publishers to print it in the next book, which they did!

We are also trying to keep the action constantly flowing between scenes - there are only four blackouts in the whole six hours, one for the end of each Act. A pair of angels, Balthamos and Baruch, tell Will that he must travel with them to give the Subtle Knife to Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, as a weapon against The Authority. Wright has also axed several key characters including Mary Malone, the scientist who stimulates Lyra's sexual awareness, and the militant angel, Metatron. The play was since then played many times in the UK, involving professionnal or amateurs and youth cast and crews. Paul and Gerry are brilliant not only at bringing the puppets to life, but also at coaching the rest of us.Apart from Milton, Pullman's books draw heavily on Homer, the Icelandic Sagas, Dante, Blake, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Wagner, Barrie and Tolkien. Bench Theatre's offering for the festive season, spread over two evenings is a mighty but cumbersome beast.

For Lyra and Will, its two central characters, it’s a coming of age and a transforming spiritual experience. It is available to watch at the National Theatre Archives in London for free with a booked appointment. The production won two Laurence Olivier Awards in 2005 for Best Set Design for Giles Cadle and Best Lighting Design for Paule Constable.It's a far better telling than the tv adaption, though, whose major achievement was to erase every characteristic of every major character, and completely miss the central point of the story.

He trembles with apprehension or curiosity; his tail beats the ground with pleasure; his back arches in hostility. Primarily a battle between good and evil, His Dark Materials is peopled by memorable characters and scenes drawn from both the human and fantasy worlds – from the armoured bears of Svallbard to the witches of The Northern Lands, from the horrors of the Cliff-ghasts to the Harpies in The Land of the Dead, from the Oxford of Lyra’s world to the brilliance of the Aurora - Pullman weaves them all together with a magical touch. Our main advantage, I thought, was that whilst we could in no way rival the sheer scale of the National production, the intimate nature of our venue lent itself to connecting more tellingly with the emotional heart of the story. Finally, for those among you who wish to test your knowledge of music, SOME of the artists/composers/groups you will hear include: Erkki Sven-Tuur, Arvo Part, Peter Sculthorpe, Kevin Volans, Philip Glass, John Cage, Zbigniew Preisner, Arnold Schoenberg, Erik Satie, Sigur Ros, Tortoise, Chicago Underground Trio, Susumu Yokota, Minotaur Shock, David Sylvian, EST, Kaada, Fourtet, Longstone and the BBC Sound effects library (well, you can't record everything yourself!The theatre world is starving for saga-style stories of this scale and the story of His Dark Materials is still entertaining and beautiful. I even detect a nod to Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, which assumes the Reformation has not taken place. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: A Multiple Allegory: Attacking Religious Superstition in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost.

At first glance, the worlds represented in Philip Pullman's trilogy of fantasy novels don't seem like easily tractable material - dark or otherwise - for the theatre. The third and final eight-episode series premiered first on HBO on 5 December 2022, and on 18 December 2022 in the UK.The revival has now ended, and there are no plans to bring it back for a third time--we will keep this section of the site online as an archive of the information relating to the play. In 2009 the Birmingham Repertory Theatre presented a new production directed by Rachel Kavanaugh before transferring to the West Yorkshire Playhouse and touring the UK. Marisa Coulter is the beautiful and manipulative mother of Lyra, and the former lover of Lord Asriel. Timothy Dalton's Lord Asriel, an aristocratic Satan challenging a crumbling divine authority, mixes Miltonic pride with boyish adventurism. Some of the music in this play has already been remixed or processed by me, and in some places a small 'sample' of a piece has been looped, processed and generally changed a bit to suit our needs.