Stir Productions

CORSETLESS by Catherine Eaton

Granary Theatre | Saturday 17th Jan | 8pm

€12 / €8

The solo show played to a sold-out audience at New York City's famed Carnegie Hall this past September, and features an entirely original score by award-winning concert pianist Elaine Kwon. The touring production is directed by Belfast-born Derek Campbell with the Voice of the Doctor performed by former Abbey Company Member Vincent O'Neill. Costuming by Susan Drozd and sound design by Tom Makar. Called “impressive and profoundly moving,” CORSETLESS is an innovative one-woman “tour de force” which follows Liv, a brilliant and troubled woman fighting for her freedom in a mental institution. After years of silent withdrawal, Olivia chooses to communicate with the world using only the words of Shakespeare. For this "crime," she is placed in isolation in a psychiatric hospital and is observed by a team of medical specialists twenty-four hours a day, among them the Doctor she trusted as a child. Stripped of her privacy and her freedom, she savagely defends her sanity against the those holding her, and the battleground she chooses is the torn text from the plays and poems of a genius whose exquisitely turned phrases have indelibly shaped our language.

Using the whole of Shakespeare’s cannon deconstructed and reassembled line by line, Eaton’s CORSETLESS creates a new and contemporary narrative, that is “a most rare vision, full of raw passion, longing, tragic humor and unfiltered humanity” Buffalo News, which “ekes delightfully unexpected moments of humor from Shakespeare’s most famous lines.” Artvoice. “Impressive and profoundly moving.” Buffalo News

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