The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh will be presenting presenting a unique evening of cultural exploration and celebration in the form of two scratch performances, Spring Lantern Riddles and The Male Queen, along with music, poetry and casual conversation at The Lyceum on Sunday 15 March from 3pm.
Part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese Classics Translation Project, funded by Arts Council England, the ancient texts will be adapted into scripts and rehearsed before being performed in English to a live audience. Performed as part of a theatrical exchange, the Royal Shakespeare Company is further funding the translation of a selection of Shakespeare’s to be adapted and performed across China.
Spring Lantern Riddles, adapted by award-winning Glasgow playwright Julie Tsang (The Family Unit, Barons Court Theatre, longlisted for The Bruntwood Prize 2019; Cruellest Month, In Motion; Lilyburgh Lane, Cumbernauld, winner of the Scotland Short Play Award 2017) and directed by Fiona Mackinnon (Flora’s Fairy Challenge, Citizens Theatre; Summer Heart, The Flinching, Tron Theatre; The City That Never Sleeps, Hong Kong Fringe Club), plays with themes of social status, gender, and cultural identity, as members of two families and their servants find themselves aboard one another’s moored boats whilst pretending to be someone they are not.
Further exploring themes of gender, sexuality, love and duty, The Male Queen, directed by playwright and librettist Pamela Carter (Them!, National Theatre of Scotland; Lines, UK and Australian tour; Fast Ganz Nah/Almost Near, Germany and UK tours; Skåne, UK and German tour – winner of the New Writing Commission at the Berliner Festspiele Stückemarkt), is a poetic and sensual story about a King who falls in love with a penniless but peerlessly beautiful young man, imploring him to dress as a woman and become his Queen – only for his younger sister, the Princess, to fall for his new bride. The production reunites its director with The Queer House actor Zachary Hing (Them!, National Theatre of Scotland; Pah-La, Royal Court Theatre; Forgotten, Theatre Royal Plymouth and Arcola Theatre; Why is the Sky Blue?, Southwark Playhouse; Jubilee, Lyric Hammersmith, The way I See It, Frantic Assembly), performing the title role, with whom they last worked on National Theatre of Scotland’s critically acclaimed Them!, last year.
With each performance lasting approximately an hour, there will be an hour-long interlude, during which further free entertainment will be available for all audience members to enjoy.