News

Julie Wilson-Bokowiec has been awarded a major ACE grant to write and produce THE LAST CUCKOO.

THE LAST CUCKOO will be directed by Bafta & Emmy nominated David Tucker who has created work for the RSC and a variety of regional theatres and is regularly at the helm of a number of the BBC’s flagship dramas.   The production will also feature a multi-channel sound score by Mark Bokowiec.

The Last Cuckoo is an intimate, poignant and often darkly comic tale of one man’s forty year journey through a period of ecological, social and political upheaval told through the changing circumstances of the everyday. Through stories, fragmented memories, catalogued facts, impressions and scrutinised details, we enter into the world of Ethan Page and experience his journey, his delights, his moments of whimsy, his despair and his heroism.

THE LAST CUCKOO is a long monologue for theatre that, on the surface, lays bare the changing circumstances of the ‘everyday’ brought about by climate change over a period of four decades. The drama explores the loss of meaning and culture through the loss of words and their reference points in nature and experience. The production uses a range of scientific projections for the next forty years of climate change to construct a circumstantial ‘road-map’ for the drama. Rather than presenting facts and figures and reiterate the received science of climate change, the play seeks to identify how such effects might impact upon everyday circumstances through a very intimate and non-scientific telling of one man’s journey.

THE LAST CUCKOO will open at the Lawrence Batley Theatre 21st October 2010 followed by a short national tour.

The production will form the centre-piece of a range of networked activities and opportunities for both students and the general public to engage directly with the artists and the production process.