Voyage Theatre Company’s Plays

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30960, 17 January 1966, Page 12

Voyage Theatre Company’s Plays

A play about dreams, presented by the noted Voyage Theatre Company, of England, will have its world premiere in Christchurch this week. It will be performed as an appendix to Christopher Fry’s “A Sleep of Prisoners.” The play, “Who’s Got The Key of the Crypt,” was written by the head of the company, Harold Lang, who with three associates will begin a three weeks’ season in New Zealand tonight. The Voyage Theatre Company, which is backed by the British Council, has won universal acclaim throughout both the English and non-

English speaking world since its inception in 1959. The company has already visited New Zealand and has come again on its way to the 1966 Adelaide Festival of Arts.

There it will present, among other works, Fry’s “A Sleep of Prisoners.” The production was specially commissioned for the Festival. The play will also be presented in Christchurch, as will “Macbeth in Camera” and “Man Speaking.” Mr Lang described the plays as “unusually frank discussions about the sacred cows of society—God, sex, Shakespeare and war.”

“Our work is not a compendia of dirty jokes or a peddling of sex plays,” he said.

The company had been named the Voyage Theatre because its members continually aimed at new destinations in the quality and purpose of their work. Mr Lang said the present climate of the theatre allowed freedom to discuss such topics as sex and religion more fully. “Subjects which were once brought up only behind closed doors can now be mentioned on the stage without raising the eyebrows even of an audience of nuns,” he said.

He confirmed his remarks made in Sydney last Friday that everyone had a “dirty mind.”

By dirty he meant thoughts about sex which had clearly occupied the minds of many illustrious writers and poets notably Shakespeare, Chaucer, Aristophanes and Blake. Mr Lang said people who could not enjoy a “dirty” joke should go to a psycho-analyst. To be sure of lively and vivid performances the company rehearses six hours a day. “People ask if rehearsing makes us stale. No. it does the opposite,” he said.