Thursday 29 - Friday 30 October 2009

Thomas Desi/ZOON Theatre
OPERATION ORLAC

8pm. Tickets £8.00 (£6.00 concessions)
Followed by optional and informal Q&A session with the artist on Thursday 29 October.
UK Premiere.

Taking as its starting point the silent film The Hands of Orlac (1924), this new show sees Orlac, a concert pianist, lose his hands in an accident. A medical transplantation of his hands is completely successful, but the nightmare really begins when Orlac is unknowingly given the hands of an executed murderer.

Operation Orlac is an operatic theatre remake of this Grand Guignol-esque classic horror and in Thomas Desi’s intimate version gestures and facial expressions are unmasked as theatrical conventions, creating the authentic mood of the expressionist classic of the silent screen.

Orlac’s terrifying story is told fusing theatre with opera, drawing on stylised film and gesture as you, the audience, are placed quite literally in the centre of the action.

Thomas Desi trained in composition, music theory and conducting in Vienna. He founded ZOON New musical theatre, in 1994. Current projects include shows for Bregenzer Festspiele, Salzburg Theater Nonntal, Sophiensaele Berlin, Frankfurt Mousonturm, FFT Dusseldorf, Ars Electronica, Lincoln Center, New York, Florence Teatro Goldoni. Lecturer at the Vienna Music University. He is the co-author of The New Music Theatre (Oxford University Press). 

TO BOOK TICKETS, CLICK HERE 

A coproduction of ZOON brut and Vienna. With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna.