THE ALMEIDA THEATRE ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF ALMEIDA THEATRE LIVE WITH A LIVE BROADCAST OF RICHARD III TO CINEMAS AROUND THE WORLD, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINMENT
The first Almeida Theatre Live broadcast will be RICHARD III, in partnership with distributor Picturehouse Entertainment, produced by Illuminations and broadcast to cinemas around the world on 21 July
ALSO ANNOUNCED:
RICHARD III will visit the renowned Kazalište Ulysses (Ulysses Theatre) Festival in Veliki Brijuni, Croatia from the 11 – 13 August
Further tickets for RICHARD III at the Almeida will be released on 8 June alongside the daily TodayTix mobile lottery and £5 tickets for Under 25’s
The Almeida will broadcast Artistic Director Rupert Goold’s production of RICHARD III, with Ralph Fiennes as Shakespeare’s most notorious villain and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Margaret, live to cinemas in the UK and around the world on 21 July.
Almeida Theatre Live will give worldwide audiences the opportunity to see plays from the stage at the Almeida’s London home for the first time. The Almeida Theatre and distributor Picturehouse Entertainment are partnering to broadcast RICHARD III, produced by Illuminations.
The production will be filmed using multiple cameras around the stage and auditorium, with John Wyver as producer. Wyver currently produces the RSC Live from Stratford-Upon-Avon international broadcasts, and with Illuminations he previously worked on filmed versions for the BBC of Hamlet with David Tennant and Macbeth with Patrick Stewart, which was directed by Rupert Goold. For the screen, Rupert also directed Richard II for the BBC’s The Hollow Crown series.
Rupert Goold said: “The chance to take the work of the Almeida to international audiences via live cinema screening is a new and timely venture for us that I’m extremely excited about.
Working with Picturehouse Entertainment and Illuminations on this broadcast I’m really looking forward to seeing how audiences around the world react to our Richard III on the big screen.”
Alice Frain, Head of Business Affairs at Picturehouse Entertainment said: “We are thrilled to be giving audiences around the world their first opportunity to see the extraordinary work of the Almeida Theatre. Richard III is the perfect start for the Almeida Live broadcasts, bringing one of Shakespeare’s best known characters, in the 400th anniversary year of the Bard’s death, to the big screen, another superb addition to live theatre content in cinemas.”
For details of screenings and booking information for the Almeida Theatre Live broadcast of
RICHARD III, check local cinema listings or visit www.live.almeida.co.uk
The full cast of RICHARD III is: David Annen, Joseph Arkley, Osman Baig, Benedict Barker, Tom Canton, Daniel Cerqueira, Simon Coates, Josh Collins, Susan Engel, Ralph Fiennes (Richard III), James Garnon, Mark Hadfield, Scott Handy, Lev Levermore, Finbar Lynch, Aislίn McGuckin, Joseph Mydell, Lukas Parish, Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Margaret), Joshua Riley, Lukas Rolfe , Joanna Vanderham, Baxter Westby and Oliver Whitehouse.
RICHARD III will be designed by Hildegard Bechtler, with costume by Jon Morrell, sound and composition by Adam Cork, lighting by Jon Clark and fight direction by Terry King.
Casting is by Joyce Nettles.
Ralph Fiennes returns to the Almeida for the first time in 16 years, having previously played the title roles in Ivanov, Hamlet (Hackney Empire), Richard II and Coriolanus (Gainsborough Studios). Other theatre work includes The Master Builder for The Old Vic; Man and Superman, Oedipus, The Talking Cure, Six Characters in Search of an Author for the National Theatre; Brand, The Plantaganets, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Troilus and Cressida for the RSC; The Tempest, God of Carnage in the West End; First Love at Lincoln Centre Festival and Sydney Festival; The Faith Healer at the Gate Theatre Dublin and on Broadway; Julius Caesar at the Barbican. His films include A Bigger Splash, Hail Caesar!
Spectre, Two Women, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Invisible Woman, Skyfall, Great Expectations, Coriolanus, Harry Potter, The Constant Gardener, The Reader, Hurt Locker, In Bruges, Schindler’s List and The English Patient. His television credits include Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia.
This is Vanessa Redgrave’s Almeida debut. Her many stage credits include The Aspern Papers (Olivier Award for Best Actress), Lady Windermere’s Fan, Daniel Deronda, The Threepenny Opera, Design for Living and The Lady from the Sea in the West End; The Year of Magical Thinking (also on Broadway), The Cherry Orchard and Not About Nightingales at The National Theatre; Driving Miss Daisy, Long Day’s Journey into Night (Tony Award for Best Actress) and Vita and Virginia on Broadway; The Tempest, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the RSC; and Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic.
Notable film appearances include Coriolanus opposite Ralph Fiennes, Evening, Venus, Howard’s End, Mrs Dalloway, Atonement, The Whistleblower, A Man for All Seasons and Camelot. Her television appearances include Nip/Tuck, The Day of the Tiffid and Call the Midwife. She is a six-time Oscar nominee and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Julia. During her career Vanessa has also won the Emmy, BAFTA, Cannes, Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild awards. She received the 2010 BAFTA Fellowship, is a 2003 American Theatre Hall of Fame inductee and was made CBE in 1967.
Rupert Goold is the Almeida’s Artistic Director where he has previously directed Medea, The Merchant of Venice, King Charles III and American Psycho, which opened on Broadway in April 2016. He was Artistic Director of Headlong from 2005 until 2013 where his work included The Effect, ENRON, Earthquakes in London and Decade. Other theatre credits include Made in Dagenham in the West End; The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Almeida; Macbeth at Chichester Festival Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway; and No Man’s Land at The Gate, Dublin and in the West End. He has twice been the recipient of the Laurence Olivier, Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard Awards for Best Director. He was Associate Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2009 to 2012 and was Artistic Director of Northampton Theatres from 2002 to 2005. On film he directed the BAFTA nominated Richard II, part of The Hollow Crown, and Macbeth for the BBC and the feature, True Story, starring James Franco and Jonah Hill. He will direct an adaptation of his production of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III for BBC Two later this year.
RICHARD III AT THE ULYSSES THEATRE FESTIVAL, CROATIA
RICHARD III will visit the renowned Kazalište Ulysses (Ulysses Theatre) Festival in Croatia from the 11 – 13 August. Taking place in a fortress on the island of Veliki Brijuni, Ulysses Theatre was established in 2001 by actor and director, Rade Šerbedžija and playwright Boris Vujčić. Lenka Udovički has been Artistic Director since 2012.
Vanessa Redgrave has a long-running relationship with Ulysses Theatre, inaugurating the first season with her concert, A Song For Love, accompanied by the Mostar Sinfonietta. She returned in 2004 with Lynn Redgrave, Caroline Jones and Amanda Plummer for Core Sample: Bare Island, connecting Waiting for Godot with testimonies from women survivors of a labour camp from 1948 – 1954, and later performed with Franco Nero at the festival’s 10th anniversary.
Ulysses Theatre, which can only be reached by boat from the mainland, offers a repertoire of topical and provocative theatre presented by Ulysses and visiting companies from Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia in July and August each year. Past performers also include Annette Benning, Angelina Jolie and Lynn Redgrave.
TICKETS FOR RICHARD III
Further tickets for RICHARD III at the Almeida will be released for sale on Wednesday 8 June.
The TodayTix RICHARD III mobile lottery will offer £20 tickets for that evening’s performance every day during the run via free theatre ticket app, TodayTix. The TodayTix RICHARD III mobile lottery launches on 7 June and will be available for evening performances throughout the run. The lottery will open from midnight for performances that day and close four hours prior to the chosen performance, with winners drawn at random and notified via email and push notification. Shared entries via Twitter and Facebook receive an additional entry into the Lottery. Everyone has the potential of three entries per performance, and can continue to apply for as many performances as desired.
Denise Wood, Executive Director of the Almeida said: “The TodayTix mobile lottery is a great digital ticketing initiative for theatres and audiences. We’re delighted to be a part of it.”
Merritt Baer, CEO and co-Founder of TodayTix, said: “We’re thrilled to be launching the Richard III ticket lottery, in celebration of our new partnership with the Almeida Theatre. As one of London’s leading theatres with a history of producing powerful and riveting productions, the Almeida is the perfect fit in continuing our mission to help bring new audiences to theatre.”
The TodayTix app is available to download for free for iOS, Android and Amazon devices via the AppStore and Google Play.
A limited number of £5 tickets for Under 25’s will be available to anyone aged 25 and under for performances of RICHARD III on Monday 13 June and Monday 18 July. These can be booked through the Box Office and online, with proof of age required for ticket collection.
ALMEIDA QUESTIONS
Almeida Questions is an eclectic programme of pre-show discussions which consider some of the questions raised by the work on the Almeida’s stage. In each discussion, invited panellists dig into the key issues and ideas emerging from the show.
Directing Shakespeare
Thursday 7 July at 5pm
Almeida Artistic Director Rupert Goold, in conversation with Ben Power, who he collaborated with on Richard II for the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, talk about the process and practice of directing Shakespeare. They will discuss Richard III, as well as Rupert’s productions of The Merchant of Venice with Ian McDiarmid at the Almeida, Macbeth with Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet.
ABOUT THE ALMEIDA THEATRE
The Almeida Theatre exists to launch the next generation of British artists onto the world stage. A small room with an international reputation, the Almeida began life as a literary and scientific society – complete with library, lecture theatre and laboratory. From the beginning, the building existed to investigate the world. Today, the Almeida makes brave new work that asks big questions: of plays, of theatre and of the world around us.
The Almeida brings together the most exciting artists to take risks; to provoke, inspire and surprise audiences; to interrogate the present, dig up the past and imagine the future.
Whether new work or reinvigorated classic, whether in the theatre, on the road or online, the Almeida makes live art to excite, enliven and entertain. The Almeida makes argument for theatre as an essential force in an increasingly fragmented society.
Founded by Pierre Audi in 1980, his successors were Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid in 1990, and Michael Attenborough in 2002. Productions including Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes in 2005, Rufus Norris’ Festen, Ruined by Lynn Nottage and most recently Chimerica, Ghosts and King Charles III have given the theatre international renown.
In Summer 2013, Rupert Goold joined the Almeida as Artistic Director. His first production was American Psycho: a new musical thriller, which then opened on Broadway in 2016. In
2014 the Almeida productions of Ghosts and Chimerica won eight Olivier Awards including Best Actress, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best New Play, Best Director and Best Revival and enjoyed transfers to the West End and Broadway respectively. This was followed by King Charles III, which transferred to the West End at the Wyndham’s Theatre and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2015, transferred to Broadway, and toured the UK and Sydney. Other notable productions as Artistic Director include The Merchant of Venice and Medea.
In Summer 2015, the Almeida presented Almeida Greeks, which included three major new productions of Oresteia, Bakkhai and Medea, the latter of which was directed by Goold, with a festival of events, performances, talks and readings running alongside.
He co-directed The Iliad and The Odyssey with Almeida Associate Director Robert Icke. Involving more than 60 readers, The Iliad reached an audience of over 50,000 people across the world, watching online, or in person at the British Museum and the Almeida Theatre. The Odyssey followed the huge success of The Iliad, and involved an army of artists in various locations around London. As with The lliad, both theatrical events were live streamed throughout and achieved ground-breaking levels of online engagement.
The Almeida is grateful to its Principal Partner Aspen, in its second term as the Almeida’s most significant corporate supporter. Aspen was established in 2002 and is a leading global insurance and reinsurance company.
www.aspen.co
The Almeida is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
ABOUT PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINMENT
Picturehouse Entertainment is the distribution arm of Picturehouse Cinemas, the owner and operator of 23 Picturehouse Cinemas and programming agent for a further 42 venues across the UK.
Since its launch in 2010, Picturehouse Entertainment has worked with renowned British directors such as Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley, and has distributed an eclectic range of theatrical releases, including BAFTA winner The Imposter; award-winning docudrama 20,000 Days On Earth, featuring Nick Cave; 2015 BIFA Award winner Dark Horse: The Incredible True Story Of Dream Alliance; and The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. 2016 has featured Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, starring Patrick Stewart, and the French dramedy Marguerite, based on the true story of singer Florence Foster Jenkins.
Picturehouse Entertainment also distributes high-profile alternative content to cinemas throughout the UK and internationally, such as hit productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Bolshoi Ballet and the National Theatre; Monty Python Live (mostly), beamed from the O2 to more than 570 cinemas in the UK and 2,000 worldwide; The Rocky Horror Show Live, broadcast to cinemas globally from London’s West End; and Roger Waters The Wall, a ground-breaking 4k Dolby Atmos capture of the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist of all time. 2015 saw the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s The Winter’s Tale, starring
Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh, broadcast to cinemas worldwide, and the season continues in 2016 with Romeo and Juliet. NT Live in 2016 has brought Les Liaisons Dangereuses featuring Dominic West, and Hangmen starring David Morrissey and Andy Nyman. Glyndebourne returns in 2016 with two new live broadcasts, including Béatrice Et Bénédict, inspired by Much Ado About Nothing; and the new Discover Arts strand continues with Teatro Alla Scala: The Temple Of Wonders and Leonardo Da Vinci: The Genius In Milan.
ABOUT ILLUMINATIONS
llluminations is an independent media producer and publisher who specialise in making and distributing films about the arts and performance. Illuminations have produced more than 250 documentaries and performance films for television, and have worked with numerous artists and creative filmmakers. Recent productions include Hamlet (2009) with David Tennant, Macbeth (2010) with Patrick Stewart, and the Royal Shakespeare
Company’s Julius Caesar (2012). Illuminations work has been recognised by both an International Emmy and a BAFTA.
ABOUT ULYSSES THEATRE
The Ulysses Theatre Festival has taken place on the island of Veliki Brijuni, Croatia every July and August since 2001. Established by actor and director, Rade Šerbedžija and playwright Boris Vujčić. Lenka Udovički has been Artistic Director since 2012. RICHARD III will play from 11 – 13 August.
Rade Šerbedžija is a Croatian actor, director and musician. As well as numerous roles in theatre, film and television in former Yugoslavia, he is known internationally for the films Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, X-Men: First Class, Mission: Impossible II, Taken 2, and the television series 24. Exiled from Croatia after the war broke out in 1991, Šerbedžija returned to his home country to establish Ulysses Theatre and play King Lear at the inaugural festival in 2001. He continues to reprise the role each year.
Lenka Udovički is a founding member of Moving Theatre Company, alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Corin Redgrave, Kika Markham and Ekkehard Schall. For Moving Theatre Company she has directed Fireraisers with Frances de la Tour, and Necessary Targets with Glenn Close. Previous work also includes The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe and King Lear, Medea, Marat/Sade, Drunk Night in 1918, Romeo and Juliet ’68, Shakespeare in the Kremlin and Antigone for Ulysses Theatre.
For further information and tickets visit: http://www.ulysses.hr/hr/
ALMEIDA LISTINGS INFORMATION
Tuesday 7 June – Saturday 6 August
RICHARD III
by William Shakespeare directed by Rupert Goold
Press Night: Thursday 16 June, 7pm
Friday 12 August – Saturday 1 October
World Premiere
THEY DRINK IT IN THE CONGO
a new play by Adam Brace directed by Michael Longhurst
World Premiere
OIL
a new play by Ella Hickson directed by Carrie Cracknell
HAMLET
by William Shakespeare directed by Robert Icke February 2017
Further details and performance dates to be announced, tickets on sale Autumn 2016
Address Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London, N1 1TA
Café Bar The Almeida Café Bar is open from 11.30am -11.00pm, Monday to Saturday
Box Office Online almeida.co.uk
Phone 020 7359 4404 (10am – 7.30pm Monday – Saturday)
In person 10am – 7.30pm, Monday – Saturday
Nearest Tube: Angel / Highbury & Islington
Richard III performances
Tuesday 7 June – Saturday 6 August Performances at 7pm
Saturday matinees at 1.30pm from 18 June
Midweek matinees on Wednesdays at 1.30pm from 22 June
They Drink It In The Congo performances Friday 12 August – Saturday 1 October Performances at 7.30pm
Saturday matinees at 2.30pm from 24 August Midweek matinees on Wednesdays from 24 August
Oil performances
Friday 7 October – Saturday 26 November Performances at 7pm
Midweek matinees on Wednesday at 1.30pm from 19 October Saturday matinees at 1.30pm from 22 October
Website almeida.co.uk
Twitter @AlmeidaTheatre
Facebook facebook.com/almeidatheatre
Instagram @almeida_theatre
Access Richard III Audio Described performances:
Saturday 23 July at 1.30pm (Touch Tour at 11.15am) Friday 29 July at 7pm (Touch Tour at 5.30pm)
Richard III Captioned performance: Monday 11 July at 7pm
They Drink It In The Congo Audio Described performances: Saturday 10 September at 2.30pm (Touch Tour at 12.30pm) Tuesday 20 September at 7.30pm (Touch Tour at 6.30pm)
They Drink It In The Congo Captioned performance: Thursday 15 September at 7.30pm
They Drink It In The Congo Relaxed Performance: Wednesday 21 September at 1.30pm
Oil Audio Described Performances:
Saturday 12 November at 1.30pm (Touch Tour at 11.15am) Friday 18 November at 7pm (Touch Tour at 5.30pm)
Oil Captioned Performance: Friday 11 November at 7pm
Talkback Post-show discussion with members of the company Free to same day ticket holders
Richard III Monday 11 July
The Drink It In The Congo Monday 19 September
Oil Monday 24 October
Almeida Questions Directing Shakespeare Thursday 7 July at 5pm
Richard III Thursday 14 July at 5.30pm
