Power Play

The world of the show:         

Power Play is passionate, military, religious – Roman.   We’re in the imperial palace at Nicaea, NW Turkey, in high summer 325AD.

Style:

21^st-century – timeless dress with a touch of bling.  

Summary:

A radical, scholarly young mother, recently widowed by her volatile imperial half-brother, arrives into an empire-shuddering, catastrophic family row.   Battling to survive, protect her son and her beliefs, she begins to realise her own imperial destiny.

Why now?

Power struggles never end.  Patriarchal religious creeds fuel them – evangelical Christians in the US; Judaic expansion in the ‘holy land’; the murders of Isis; Hindu supremacists in India; in China, the suppression of Muslim Uighurs.  

The struggles of Roman political families, and the acts of women in them, are mirrored in our own times – Indira Ghandi, Jiang Qing, Princess Diana, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hillary Clinton – and Kamala Harris.   Characters are driven by powerful values – by personal, political or religious creeds.  

Power Play is the story of a woman challenging the family and political power structures into which she is born.   And the show expresses the seductive beauty – and the danger – of creeds.

Sample songs:

https://youtu.be/CK_H9nj5zDQ

Principal characters:

Constantia, (F) age 30, princess, scholar, mother, widow
Fausta (F), 36, Empress, Constantia’s aunt, wife of Constantine
Helena (F), 77, dowager empress, Constantine’s mother

Eusebius (gender fluid), 50s, Persian, chief of staff and political fixer

Constantine (M), 44, Roman Emperor, half-brother of Constantia
Arius (M), 30s, Libyan priest from Alexandria
Alexander (M), 60s, Egyptian Bishop of Alexandria
Crispus (M), 26, an imperial military hero, Constantine’s son
Valerius (M), 12, an imperial schoolboy, Constantia’s son

Creed, a Chorus, composed of the main characters.

Who’s attached?

Composer and Orchestrator: Christopher Walker (West End and Broadway: Top Hat, Cabaret, Follies, Funny Girl);
Writer: Ian Grant (The Merciless Mission of Molly McCloy, After the Ball, Stella Europa)
Director: Psyche Stott (The Wind in the Willows (AD), Blue Remembered Hills, Calendar Girls, Hedda Gabler)
Musical Director: Josh Sood (Dr Dolittle, The Fix, Duncton Wood, Jerry Springer, The Opera)
Movement/choreography: – Nadia Sohawon (FYS Co, Clement Parkin, BOSS)
General Management: SMART Entertainment
Cast includes: Kim Ismay, Shirley Jameson, Christina Modestou, Leah Barbara West, Will Arundell, Kurt Kansley, Sam Odaleinde, Jeremy Secomb