Sunday 30 June 2019, 4.00 pm
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
21 New Globe Walk
Bankside
London SE1 9DT
The Greeks are demanding the return of Helen. The Trojans meet. Paris wants to keep her. Antenor argues for her return. Priam will have to determine which route is the more advantageous or disadvantageous for the state.
Be part of a Read Not Dead first: This script-in-hand performance is being staged simultaneously in Warsaw as well as in The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on the 9 June 2019.
Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys is written by Polish playwright, Kochanowski. This talented writer is regarded as the father of Polish verse. The play was the first tragedy written and performed in Polish and was presented at a wedding in Warsaw in 1579. The simultaneous staging of the play, in Polish, takes place on the site of that original performance.
The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys will be followed by a reading of Kochanowski’s extra-ordinarily moving Laments, written following the death of his 2 year old daughter, in a translation by Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney and Stanislaw Baranczak. Heaney regarded the Laments as Poland’s equivalent of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Instinctive, adrenalin-filled and inventive, the Read Not Dead ground rules are simple. Actors rehearse the play on a Sunday morning and present it, script-in-hand, to an audience later that afternoon. The Read Not Dead series is dedicated to reviving plays from the early modern period.