The Orchestra

CAST

Patricia: Tatiana Kouzovkina

Pamela: Frouke Flieringa

Madame Hortense: Peppie Mac Ruairi /

Petra Stork

Suzanne Delicias: Saskia Jelsma

Leona: Grainne Delaney / Annemiek Engelen

Monsieur Leon: Neville Powis / Bert Apeldoorn

Ermeline: Sophie Ruthven-Stuart /

Olga Luzgina

Monsieur Lebonze: Brian Andre

Director/design Vladimir Koifman

Translation: Frouke Flieringa

Music: Jan Joost van Elburg/ Tania Lina

Costumes Natalia Konde

Choreography: Tania Lina

PRESS

…L´Orchestre est une pièce divertissante et ce parce que´elle compte sur les comédiens, leurs voix deviennent donc des instruments musicaux. L´adaptation dramatique se présente d’ un façon complètement abstraite. Ainsi cette spectacle jouit des composantes d´une excellente pièce théâtrale: des personnages humoristiques, des dialogues révélant, et un choix des situations comiques…..

Alaa Al Dakar, Cairo Gazette, September 1997

...The actors established the communication with an audience from various cultures with great success. A performance, highly entertaining for all, without compromising the serious nature of the original text…

Hazem Azmy, Cairo Experimental 1997

...A wonderfully well composed show with bright, grotesque acting; sensitive and cruel, comical and deeply moving…

Leonid Popov, “Smena”, St. Petersburg, 1994 (Baltic House Theatre Festival)

Première 1992 Amsterdam

In a cheap brasserie, somewhere in a spa town in France, plays an orchestra consisting of six women and one man. From the conversations during and inbetween the music the audience learns the major and minor worries of the musicians and their struggle for power. There is a polite tug of war between the conductor and one of the musicians for the favors of the only male colleague; the first and second violinist are rivals and the timid flutist is obliged to listen breathlessly to the marital problems of one of her colleagues. One of the members of the orchestra is devoured by the care of her demented mother; another sways between pangs of guilt about her little daughter and her passion for men and a third cannot cope with her role as insignificant mistress of a pathetic little man. The ageing conductor desperately tries to pull the strings.

The Orchestra, written in 1962, is a pearl from the work of the French playwright Jean Anouilh. Amsterdam Chamber Theatre made this performance into a grotesque musical show from the sixties. The music (hits like ´Hit the Road Jack´;´California Dreaming’ and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) are performed a capella by the actors.