After success at the White Bear Theatre with folk-song homage Flowers of the Field in 2014, award-winning playwright Kevin Mandry returns this month to premiere EROS. The brand-new play – an urgent topical drama about “the female body, consent and agency” – runs 28 August to 15 September 2018, with a press night on 30 August. Casting is now announced.
With one click anything becomes an image, and image is everything. What happens when fantasy becomes more real than flesh?
Ross used to take photos of women. He says it was about beauty. Now Kate’s back in his studio after twenty years. She remembers things differently. She says she’s there for justice.
Having become aware how younger generations had grown up in a world mediated overwhelmingly through screens, author Kevin Mandry wrote EROS to explores how this is increasingly corrupting many human relationships.
Anna Tymoshenko, Stephen Riddle & Felicity Jolly star in EROS
Set in the 1990s at the dawn of the internet, the show targets the moment when digital images first began to dominate our consciousness, and a younger generation began to feed hungrily on them. EROS brings to life the effects of society’s obsessions with beauty and conformity.
This tense three-hander stars Stephen Riddle as Ross, Anna Tymoshenko as Kate and Felicity Jolly as Teri. It’s directed by Stephen Bailey, designed by Jessica Staton and produced by Heather Ralph for Downland Productions.
Kevin Mandry
About Kevin Mandry
Kevin Mandry is a playwright and freelance writer. For thirty years he has worked in the commercial field as a corporate scriptwriter/copywriter, working on numerous corporate projects. Around this, his theatre work included a variety of productions and commissions, including Citizen Ilyushin (Liverpool Everyman/Tricycle Theatre, now Kiln Theatre 1982), Lost Paradise (Churchill Theatre 1983), Romance (Orange Tree Theatre 1986), A Place in the Desert (Bristol Young Vic 1990), Remembrance (Commission, Young Exchange Manchester 1990), Buskers (Birds Nest Theatre 1995) and Silence of Stars (BBC R4 2002).
In the 1990s, Mandy was twice winner of the annual North West Playwrights Writing Competition, organised by Contact Theatre Manchester, for whom he also served as a script-reader. Between 1990 and 1995, he was the NW Regional Secretary of the Theatre Writers Union. Following early retirement in 2010, he has now returned to writing for the stage.
EROS is the second play of his to be performed at the White Bear Theatre, following Flowers of the Field, which ran for three weeks in June 2014. The “simply and beautifully written” study of early twentieth-century folk-song collectors “captured the heart and soul of an era”, according to OffWestEnd.com.
