2014, June 14th

Queen

EDWARD II.
A Royal Tragedy

after Christopher Marlowe
Comic opera for extravagant male choir
by Alexander Strauch (music/text)

Premiere (world premiere) in Ireland:
Saturday 14 June 2014 at 5.30pm in the Helix Theatre, Dublin.

Premiere in a new version (German premiere) in Germany:
Black Box im Gasteig, Munich:

Saturday, 7 March 2015
Sunday, 8 March 2015
Monday, 9 March 2015

Musical direction/libretto: Alexander Strauch
Narrator's texts: Christopher Robson, Martina Veh, Torsten Westphal,
Martin Röhrs, Benjamin Merkler, Nikolaus Maier

Ensemble: Philhomoniker, Schwuler Chor München e.V.

Frank Selzle on the grand piano

Ks. Christopher Robson as narrator

Direction/Concept: Martina Veh
Set/Concept: Nikolaus Maier
Video: Gerhard Huber/Wolfgang Scherer/Nikolaus Maier
Photo: Martin Rothfelder

Comic opera, a new genre:
After twenty-five years of presenting music shows and staged revues at home and abroad, and most recently performing an adaptation of the Handel opera Julius Caesar - Headless in Egypt (awarded 4 stars by the press at the Edinburgh Festaival in 2012 as " birilliantly humorous and most of all fun") with the original arias and new compositions, their musical director Alexander Strauch has written a complete new composition on another classic. It is the play "Edward II" by Christopher Marlow, written around 1590, which Strauch used as a libretto.

As in other plays before, Martina Veh was responsible for the staging and, with the help of Nikolaus Maier's set, created a special stage aesthetic that constitutes a new form of "comic opera for choir": a comic strip-like realisation of a classical material with the simple means of a costume picture worn on the body, which is both a stage set and - through highly variable use - a costume picture at the same time.

A narrator, the Joker (Christopher Robson), leads through the whole story as a projected head on the Joker playing card.

Edward II wanted to become the Queen of England rather than a feisty, fighting warrior. His childhood friend Piers Gaveston, a young, DAMN good-looking French petty nobleman, had put ideas into Edward's head and made a money-grubbing, ostentatious pass at Edward. Edward's father, the King of England, was not at all pleased with the disposition of the heir to the throne.
 He quickly deported the stumbling block back to France and suggested that his son put his energies into a more fruitful field of employment: Isabella, daughter of the King of France, his future wife.

As fate would have it, the old king suddenly fell ill and died.
Edward II is now king and immediately brings his french toy boy back to the English court. This makes the ambitious nobles and gentry - especially the royal treasurer Bishop Langton - exceedingly displeased: The last thing they need at court is this Gaveston, a greedy little frog-leg-eating busybody who will only get in the way of their machinations. But Edward is determined! So is Isabella! Exasperated, she takes a lover: Roger Mortimer and recruits an army.

"Oh dear - A big, heartless card game. Lucky who has the joker."


Sponsored by
the City of Munich
A production of the Philhomoniker, Schwuler Chor München e.V.