Judith Adams - Playwright & Dramatist
www.judithadams.co.uk"Adams' words are superb... beautiful and moving." Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
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- About Judith Adams
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Live & Theatre
- SOUTH RIDING
- AFFILIATED PLAYWRIGHT - UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD
- THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS
- VARIANCE
- LADY PURPLE WORKSHOP PHOTOGRAPHS
- BURDALANE ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE PROJECT
- THE LOVES OF LADY PURPLE
- STONES WORKSHOP / FRANCE
- DANCE WORKSHOPS / CORTES ISLAND / CANADA
- VILLETTE - dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's novel
- - and after
- MARGIE GILLIS / UBC WORKSHOP (VANCOUVER)
- SWEET FANNY ADAMS IN EDEN
- CROW PLAY
- WOMEN ON THE BRINK
- SHAKESPEARE'S DAUGHTERS
- QUEUEING FOR EVEREST
- THE BONE ROOM
- THE LITTLE MERMAID
- VILLETTE
- BURDALANE
- New Media
- Radio : Original
- Radio : Dramatisation
- Extracts
- Reflections on Process
Agent's Details
Live and Theatre Work
SOUTH RIDING
2011/12
A West Yorkshire Playhouse project.
South Riding - An English Landscape by Winifred Holtby
published (posthumously) in 1936
Dramatised for ensemble performance by Judith Adams
"I want to do something hard, muscular, compact, very little emotional and then the emotion hammered into style. Metal work, not water colour." Winifred Holtby.
directed by Alex Chisholm
For performance in the Quarry Theatre, 2011/12
AFFILIATED PLAYWRIGHT - UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD
The Drama Division, School of Music and Drama, UoH
Affiliated to teach on MA courses within the Department of Theatre, Drama and Performance: Writing for Performance and Ensemble Physical Theatre, Training and Performance.
Research in progress, to explore and evolve new ideas for playwright training and the embodying of text, exploring the practice and pedagogy of contemporary playwrighting (outside the convention of the 'well-made play') in the areas of: dramaturgy (through interrogating my own workshop-based word-creation processes) and psycho-physical training (exploring, with my university colleagues, a new, body-based module for playwright training)
The University supports this exploration, focused around two personal projects with cross-art form content: Lady Purple and Burdalane (see below), through involvement of staff and student personnel, and by allowing use of their studio spaces and facilities wherever possible.
THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS
August 2009
"Judith Adams is the perfect choice to adapt Muriel Spark's sly and tender novel about a group of young women living on little more than hope and euphoria..." Guardian preview
SPARK ADAPTATION FLAMES INTO LIFE *****
Monday, August 17, 2009
".....we have Stellar Quines' masterly Girls Of Slender Means, the result of producer/director Muriel Romanes commissioning the playwright Judith Adams to adapt Spark's slim 1963 book.....this graceful production flows ....the performances are faultless....Spark gave Adams' first draft her blessing; and she has brought the text bitingly alive and as savagely brilliant as ever." Metro, NADINE MCBAY
"Scotland's leading women's theatre company has succeeded in bringing together a fascinating first-ever stage version...in a strong and thought-provoking adaptation by Judith Adams....a powerful and gripping contribution to this year's Festival debate on the idea of enlightenment...." Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman ****
"packed audiences are lapping up Judith Adams' fine adaptation in a poetic, deliquescent production by Muriel Romanes....the mood, and sense of history, is spot on....there's a gallery of outstanding performances led by Maureen Beattie...brilliant newcomer Melody Grove as their poetry-reciting conscience, and Candida Benson as the sexy Selina. A show with a big future, I'd guess." Michael Coveney, WHAT"S ON Stage ****
"Adams's script is beautifully fractured, and Muriel Romanes's production....has a fevered quality that feeds the idea that 'death is just a tick away'" Lyn Gardner, The Guardian ***
NOMINATION for BEST ENSEMBLE at the Festival: The Stage ****
"there is no doubting the clarity of vision..." Oliver Farrimond, Fest.***
Between VE Day and VJ Day, as the war-shaken May of Teck Club collapses in its very own peace-time holocaust, the world loses the last vestiges of its torn and tattered innocence, slips between the sheets with Mammon and goes to the Devil as simply as a beautiful young girl slips into the chiffon folds of a bartered Schiaparelli dress for her night out.
Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive John Updike, New Yorker
Music Hall, Assembly Rooms, George Street box office
box office: 0131 623 3030
www.assemblyfestival.com
6th to 31st Aug 2009, 2.50pm
Producer/director: Muriel Romanes, Stellar Quines Theatre Company
Funded by Scottish Arts Council and Assembly Festival
(MORAL: "It's just a matter of time" Muriel Spark The Girls of Slender Means)
VARIANCE
September 23rd - 26th 2009
Inspired by Bach's Goldberg Variations
Text exploration towards performance at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield of MA Ensemble Physical Theatre students, led by John Britton
With Chris Coe
University of Huddersfield
LADY PURPLE WORKSHOP PHOTOGRAPHS
May 2008
Local, national and international artists assembled for two workshops hosted by the University of Huddersfield Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance in January and May 2008, for a total of 7 days.
These workshops were funded by Arts Council England (Yorkshire), Whitestone Arts (Yorkshire), Fifty-Nine Productions (London/NY) and the University of Huddersfield
BURDALANE ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE PROJECT
The University of Huddersfield has generously agreed to fund a major feasibility study as Stage One of a full-scale professional production of the full performance-based text.
Facilitator and director: John Britton, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance and cracking good at impro and Being Appleton.
THE LOVES OF LADY PURPLE
Workshops funded by Arts Council England (Yorkshire), Whitestone Arts (Yorkshire), Fifty-Nine Productions (London/NY) and the University of Huddersfield in January and May 2008.
A team of playwright + video/film designers, dancers, puppeteers, performers and musicians explored the physical and linguistic/aural text of a dramatisation of Angela Carter's The Loves of Lady Purple,
STONES WORKSHOP / FRANCE
April 8th-17th
"Stones have been known to move and trees to speak" (Macbeth)
Physical Training, Ensemble and Macbeth
Leader:
Au Brana Cultural Centre, Pauilhac, South of France
DANCE WORKSHOPS / CORTES ISLAND / CANADA
July 12 - 22
Based at HOLLYHOCK Arts and Retreat Centre (BC CANADA)
Leaders:
Margie Gillis: Dancing from the Inside Out
Tedd Robinson: Functional Movement
VILLETTE - dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's novel
23 October - 1st November 2008
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
Second year students reprise the gothic adventures of Lucy Snowe
Director: Deborah Paige
Thursday 23rd October - Saturday 1 November 2008
Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre - 7.30pm (Mat. 2.30)
- and after
25-27 September, 2008
Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield
Collaboration with students studying for the University of Huddersfield's MA in Ensemble Physical Theatre: Training and Performance.
exploring text and movement with John Britton and Chris Coe
PART ONE: GENESIS TO NEMESIS
7.30pm
Matinee 2.30 pm, Friday
MARGIE GILLIS / UBC WORKSHOP (VANCOUVER)
17th / 18th / 19th March 2008
A workshop funded by the University of British Columbia, Canada with solo dancer and choreographer Margie Gills and Professor Michelle LeBaron to explore, through dance and language, the negative and positive character of conflict - its nature and its possible uses.
SWEET FANNY ADAMS IN EDEN
2007 web version currently broadcasting here
A three-year project, commissioned by Stellar Quines Theatre Company and funded by the Scottish Arts Council for performance in Pitlochry Plant Collectors' Memorial Garden (2003).
Company: Judith Adams, Muriel Romanes, Leo Warner, Robert Sharp, Francis Gallop, Colette O'Neil, Wendy Seagar, Alexandra Mathie, Luke Shaw, Kern Faulkner, Jonathan Battersby, Pauline Lockhart, Yonnie Fraser, Karen Bryce, Anna Cocciadiferro, Jemima Levick, Ian Jackson, Gemma Swallow, Jessica Richards, Sunita Hundija, Jacqui Howard, Stephanie Turner, Kate Quinn, Alex Bynoth, Katie Durkin, Claire Halleran, Catherine Lindow, Lisa Sangster, Amy Elder, Ross Adam, Dan Huke, Simon Warner, Joanna Boyce, Alison Reever, Kirstin Roan, members of Lyceum Youth Theatre.
The first public performances of Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden took place in the Pitlochry Plant Collectors' Garden in August 2003, but this version was already an adaptation of the original, which exists, in all its mutable dialogue and descriptive elements, on a hypertext site created for playwright Judith Adams by media artists Leo Warner and Robert Sharp of Fifty Nine Productions. This enabled her to lay simultaneous script modules out spatially on computer, and then "walk" different pathways between them, moving backwards and forwards through time. In its simplest form, such a structure is most closely described as a 3-D mind map. This was adapted for the challenging terrain of Pitlochry, losing some elements and gaining others along the way.
These modules, which cannot be published in any conventional way, remain available for re-assembly into any site-specific production.
WOMEN ON THE BRINK
November 2007
Text provision on the hoof (or wing) for international 3 year project exploring depression and creativity. Co-production between Edinburgh (Stellar Quines), Montreal (Imago Theatre) and Romania (National Theatre of Timisoara). Workshops at The Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 2006, National Theatre of Timisoara 2007.
SHAKESPEARE'S DAUGHTERS
December 2007 -
Epistolatory revelations, with Sue Limb
This forthright union of Trinny and Susannah and Charlie's Garden Army with Shakespeare in Love is sure to contain startling new evidence of the surprising importance of Birmingham in the cultural renaissance and plumbing advances of Elizabethan life. Edgebaston Racing Monthly
.
QUEUEING FOR EVEREST
April 2000
16th March - 8th April 2000
Published by Oberon Modern Plays:
email Oberon Books
Directed by Deborah Paige
Designed by Kit Surrey
Choreographed by Ruth Jones
Photographic Installation by Simon Warner
Synopsis:
When Georges leaves his sick wife Sophie and flies out to meet Thea at Everest Base Camp, their goals seem simple: to continue an affair and to climb the highest mountain in the world. But when a Sherpa guide and an elusive photographer join them on their journey they enter a mysterious territory of ghosts. Some, like Mallory, are children of the mountain; others have travelled with them from their pasts.
THE BONE ROOM
June 1998
Directed by Mark Stuart Currie and Janet Gordon
Designed by Olivia Gill
Choreography by Nike Imoru
Synopsis:
A young Charles V of Flanders shipwrecks on the North coast of Spain on his way to visit his mother Juana, locked in a tower at Tordesillas, to claim the crown of Spain from her. He is captured and then entertained by a group of Picaros who with their mysterious "Queen" lead him through episodes of Spain's history to a meeting with his mother, where a critical decision has to be made for his own future and that of the world.
THE LITTLE MERMAID
December 1997
December 1997
For children 7-10
Directed by Catriona Murray
Designed by Kate Burnett
Based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen
VILLETTE
March 1997
March / April 1997
Directed by Deborah Paige
Designed by Geraldine Pilgrim
Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan
Dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's Villette
Company: Derek Hutchinson, Holly de Jong, Martin Ledwith. Poppy Miller, Michael Glenn Murphy, Sonya Walger (+ workshops: Angus Wright, Chris McHallem, Lucy Hall, Myra McFadyen)
BURDALANE
November 1996
One Horse Productions
Battersea Arts Centre
November 1996
Directed by Gaynor Macfarlane
Designed by Tim Meacock
Company: Nick Fletcher, Lorraine Hilton, Dean McGuirn, Jamie Roberts, Isobel Middleton, Tracy Wiles, Lyn Christie, Rose Keegan, Kate Laurie, Raewyn Lippert, Michael Larkin, Lawrence Crawford.
PHOTO: KATE LAURIE, RAEWYN LIPPERT, LYN CHRISTIE, ROSE KEEGAN
