The Revival of Huntly Carter: Workshop Performance by Menagerie Theatre Company
Thursday 8 June 2023
TORCH in partnership with Menagerie Theatre Company presents The Revival of Huntly Carter.
This workshop performance was the first fruit of a year-long collaboration between Professor Rebecca Beasley (Faculty of English, University of Oxford) and Patrick Morris (Theatre Director and Writer, Menagerie Theatre Company). It followed by a response from Professor Claire Warden (Loughborough University) and a Q&A with the creators and cast.
Huntly Carter was a founder member of the 1920s Workers’ Theatre Movement. His journalism, books and lectures introduced the revolutionary theatrical experiments of the new Soviet Union to a huge British audience, but today he is barely a footnote in theatre history. To find out why, The Revival of Huntly Carter brings together three unruly investigators from the newly created Ministry of National Consciousness. Their task – to decide for the country whether Carter should now be officially remembered. But with no living witnesses, an unreliable archive and divisions in the team, how will they make their final choice?
A play with songs and live music, The Revival of Huntly Carter explores how we choose our history through those we celebrate and those we ignore.
For more information about Huntly Carter, see: Huntly Carter Papers, University of Notre Dame and Huntly Carter Collection, SCRSS
Out of the Archive onto the Stage: the Soviet Avant-Garde and its Reception in Britain Knowledge Exchange Project, Britain and the Soviet Union: Early Cultural Encounters Network, TORCH Networks
