A quartet of female stories about war, US playwright Zoë Guzy-Sprague’s The Net will run for a week in London this summer as part of the Camden Fringe. Book your tickets now.
The co-production between Starbound Theatre and Lights Down Productions runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre from 13 to 17 August 2019.
All the stones have been used, all the brick, all the sand. The only thing left that can keep people out is a giant net, a border between two lands, stretched across the stage. A grandmother and her granddaughter are tasked with patching a hole in the border. As they weave it closed, two women appear on the other side, hoping to get through. The women must come face to face with each other as opinions change and loyalties switch.
Mixing poetic choral monologues and cutting dialogue, The Net brings a new dimension to the age-old story of war by placing women at the centre, while exposing how utterly foolish the divides we create are. It is an ensemble piece that aims to highlight women of all different backgrounds and ages: from 14 to 70. The play uses the personal stories of these four women and their interactions with each other to interrogate larger political themes.
Cast of The Net
The four women in the production are played by Marta da Silva, Yvonne Wan, Melaina Pecorini and Sue Moore. Da Silva boasts credits including I Will Miss You When You’re Gone, Pizza Man and Acid Rain with her company Starbound Theatre, while Wan appears in four films release in 2019; Clowndoll, House of Bricks, Indulgence and Reign of Chaos. Recent East 15 graduate Pecorini toured in Tangled Feet’s That Parking Show, and Moore has appeared in a host of short films.
They are directed by Samara Gannon, whose credits include Three at the National Theatre Connections Youth Festival and You Me Bum Bum Train.
Speaking about the play, Guzy-Sprague said:
“I wrote The Net after a trip to Israel placed me in the direct confrontation with a wall. I had never been to the US/Mexico border or to Belfast. Other than a piece of the Berlin wall in a ziplock bag that I found in my Mum’s closet when I was little, my trip to Israel was the first time I had personally been confronted by this big, looming mass of concrete. My first thought was that this division felt so utterly arbitrary. That we share history and land and blood and yet we are different.
“The Net tries to unpick this feeling, to understand divisions and conflicts by weaving and unweaving a border. In the three years since writing the first draft, old walls have been rebuilt and extended; the divisions they create have become the root from which today’s politicians stoke fear and fake news and paint pictures of struggling humans as ‘animals’. Now more than ever we need to force ourselves to confront the walls that divide us, to try to see things from ‘the other side’.”
The Net is the first co-production between Starbound Theatre and Lights Down Productions. Starbound Theatre is an emerging, international, London-based theatre company with a focus on identity. Lights Down Productions was founded by Caley Powell in 2018 to produce female-led writing, making a splash with its first production Hear Me Howl.
The Tristan Bates Theatre has a packed summer of Camden Fringe shows. In addition to The Net, it’s hosting love story between art and science Discord of Discourse, dark romance The Geminus, Shakepearean satire Boris Rex and more.
Full festival programme
For details on all 300+ shows in the 2019 Camden Fringe programme, visit the festival website
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