Earthquakes in London

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Description

It's Cabaret, we've got our heads down and we're dancing and drinking as fast as we can. The enemy is on its way, but this time it doesn't have guns and gas it has storms and earthquakes, fire and brimstone.... You were the glimmer. At the end of the tunnel. And you went out.

An all-pervasive fear of the future and a guilty pleasure in the excesses of the present drive Mike Bartlett's epic rollercoaster of a play from 1968 to 2525 and back again.

Earthquakes in London includes burlesque strip shows, bad dreams, social breakdown, population explosion, worldwide paranoia. It is a fast and furious metropolitan crash of people, scenes and decades, as three sisters attempt to navigate their dislocated lives and loves, while their dysfunctional father, a brilliant scientist, predicts global catastrophe.

Mike Bartlett's contemporary and directed dialogue combines a strong sense of humanity with epic ambition, as well as finely-aimed shafts of political comment embedded effortlessly into every scene. Earthquakes in London represents modern playwriting at its most exciting and ambitious.

Reviews

Mike Bartlett has created something completely different: a three hour play of startling ambition ... this demented carnival confirms Bartlett, 29, as one of our most exciting young playwrights. -- Henry Hitchings * Evening Standard *
The play does its job of reminding us just how precarious our existance is. -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times *
Bartlett beautifully combines domestic and cosmic issues. -- Michael Billington * Guardian *
Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London is the theatrical equivalent of a thrilling roller coaster ride. -- Charles Spencer * Telegraph *

Author Bio

Mike Barlett's debut, My Child (Royal Court, May 2007) saw him hailed by The Stage as 'one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent times'. He is a winner of the Old Vic New Voices Award for Artefacts (Bush Theatre), and is currently participating in the prestigious Pearson Playwrights Scheme. He won the Writer's Guild Tinniswood and Imison prizes for his radio play, Not Talking.