Bell Shakespeare.

Night Songs will be a new music theatre work
for family audiences.

The events of Night Songs take place over the course of one night, from nightfall to sunrise.

Two orphaned brothers – Tom, 12, and Jack, early 20s – live in a battered caravan on a wasteland in the outskirts of a large industrial city. Every evening, Jack goes into the city to scavenge (and perhaps steal) whatever he can, to make their meagre living. While Jack is gone, Tom – who has never dared to confess to Jack his fear of the dark or his loneliness – invents a companion for himself, Jake. In many ways, Jake is a magical version of Jack: older, weirder, with wings, wearing a crumpled top hat and ragged coat tails. What Jake loves to do is to tell stories, and Tom loves to hear them.

The idea will be to create a work of theatre that engages the imaginative possibilities of narrative to create a night of theatrical contrasts, visual, musical and emotional. The stories told by Tom and Jake will be drawing on various traditions of storytelling, from Aesop’s Fables to Til Eulenspiegel, Gypsy folk tales, fairy tales and myths. Some will be sung, some will be spoken and some will be enacted.

GREEN ROOM MUSIC

Green Room Music will work with Mind’s Eye on the creative development of this new work, with an outstanding team of creative artists: poet/critic and librettist Alison Croggon, dramatist/librettist Daniel Keene, and composer/performer/music educator and artistic director of Green Room Music, Andrée Greenwell.

ANDRÉE GREENWELL