Calvino Nights
Minack Theatre & The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall
Production photos by Steve Tanner
About
The wild possibility of fire, feast and fun-filled fiasco!
Italian writer Italo Calvino collected folk tales from across Italy and rewrote them with a lavish sprinkling of exaggeration. CALVINO NIGHTS is inspired by a mix of several of these stories.
Original song and music sits at the heart of the production, which takes audiences on an adventurous ride through tales about a boy the size of a pea, a skinflint miser and a woman who lives on nothing more than wind. These characters are joined by hapless robbers in search of their moral compasses and fallen angels that dance with flames, in a production featuring circus tricks, puppetry and fire, and performed, quite literally, on the cliff-edge precipice of the Minack Theatre in Cornwall.
CALVINO NIGHTS played at the Minack Theatre from 1 - 19 May and The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall from 27 - 29 May 2022.
For more information about the production, please visit the Minack Theatre website here.
Creative Team
Co-directors: Elayce Ismail & Mike Shepherd
Musical Director: Alex Lupo
Devised by the Company
Writers: Tim Dalling, Carl Grose, Anna Maria Murphy & Mike Shepherd
Composers: Dom Coyote, Tim Dalling, Alex Lupo, Justin Lee Radford
Fire design & construction: Paka
Lighting design: Lucy Gaskell
Sound design: Peter Buffery
Costume: Lucy Seaber
Puppets, props & set: Eddie Butler, Anthony Crosby, Alice King, Laura Mackenzie, Mae Voogd, Luke Wood, Lyndie Wright & Sarah Wright
Design, costume & music ideas: Ruth Shepherd
Production Manager: Tim Boyd
Company Manager: Jenny Beare
Cast
Girum Bekele, Peter Buffery, Tim Dalling, James Gow, Bea Holland, Paka Johnson, Caitlin Kaur, Alex Lupo, Mike Shepherd, Sarah Wright
Selected Reviews
**** ‘... it is as if the stories slowly bloom up among the cast, much like the set seems to have grown from the ground... the open air, clifftop Minack has instant atmosphere – the backdrop is the Atlantic Ocean – but CALVINO NIGHTS fully utilises the setting. It’s theatre that sharpens the senses... This compassionate show wears its heart on its sleeve. It also has a sharp sense of political outrage… This is nothing if not beautiful.'
The Guardian