On Friday 25th August there will be a one-off community performance of Pixerécourt’s melodrama La Forteresse du Danube (1805) in translation at the Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, North Yorkshire. It will have a professional director, Sarah Wynne Kordas, and orchestra, led by musicologist and violinist Dr Diane Tisdall, with Dr Sarah Burdett as dramaturge. Pixerécourt was one of the most performed playwrights in the first part of the 19th century in France, and worldwide. He was the leading exponent of melodrama, a form of early 19th-century theatre which combined sentimental plot devices with spectacle, comedy and music: we will be using the original score to the Lille performances of the play. The performance takes place during Richmond’s Georgian festival and is a great opportunity to experience a Napoleonic melodrama in Britain’s oldest working theatre.

Tickets are on sale for £9 at http://georgiantheatreroyal.savoysystems.co.uk/GeorgianTheatreRoyal.dll/TSelectItems.waSelectItemsPrompt.TcsWebMenuItem_1352.TcsWebTab_1353

The performance is the culmination of an AHRC-funded project on staging Napoleonic theatre and we hope you’ll be able to join us for a great night out.

Follow us on Twitter @actingmelodrama
More details about the project can be found here:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/napoleonictheatre/staging/

Kate Astbury, Sarah Burdett, Diane Tisdall

katherine.astbury@warwick.ac.uk