Season Of Foreign Theatre

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30957, 13 January 1966, Page 11

Season Of Foreign Theatre

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.P.A. > LONDON, Jan. 12. Five foreign theatre companies, three of them paying their first visit to London, will stage 12 productions during the World Theatre season this year. The season, presented by I the Royal Shakespeare ComI pany, will run for nine weeks from March . 21. The companies will come from Greece, Czechoslavakia. ! Italy, Poland and Russia. The plays will be presented in the companies’ native languages, with English translations given by earphones. The season will be opened by the Czech National Theatre which will appear in

“The Insect Play,” by Karel Capek. The Italian company, Compagnia Dei Giovani, which was in last year’s season will present two plays by Pirandello, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” and "The Rules of the Game.” The Greek National Theatre ■ last in London in 1939, will | present three classic plays “Hecuba” by Euripides, and “Oedipus Rex” and “Oedipus at Colonus,” by Sophocles. The fourth company, the comparitively new Polish Popular Theatre will present two productions which have already won prizes, “The Weddings,” by Stanislaw Wyspianski and an adaptation of Dostoievsky’s “Crime and

1 Punishment.” Their third will be “The - Columbus Boys (Warsaw 44i 46)” a documentary tragedy I from a novel by Roman • Bratny. i The final weeks of the seal son will be occupied by the Gorki Theatre of Leningrad, ! which has never been seen I before in Western Europe. Its three plays are. “The I Idiot,” another adaptation i ’ from a Dostoievsky novel star-! I ring Innokenti Smoktunov- ■ sky, who was widely acclaimi ed in the Russian film vert sion of “Hamlet,” “The Bar- ! barians,” by Maxim Gorki and > a modern Soviet comedy with ' music, “Grandma, Uncle Iliko, i Hilarion and I," by Dur.ibadze I and Lordkipanidze.