PL AYBILL OF HUMAn BONDAGE
world premiere
OF HUMAN BONDAGE
Vern Thiessen Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham }{
approximate running time: 2 hours & 10 minutes. there will be one 20 minute intermission
TIDBITS
ARTIST NOTE: GREGORY PREST I’m writing this in the middle of our fourth week of rehearsal. No one will read it for nearly a month. It’s sort of like just cracking an egg and already talking about the taste of the cake. I can’t speak to the cake yet but, boy, are these eggs something. There’s true collaboration going on in this rehearsal hall. There’s great care in storytelling. There are some terrible ideas. And there are some terrible ideas that just might work. I’m surrounded by incredibly talented and generous people. I love the fact that we’re a group of artists, colleagues, lovers and friends putting our heads and hearts together to give life to a fictional world peopled by... artists, colleagues, lovers and friends. Albert is bending time and space in sensitive and outrageous ways that both spark our imaginations and leave us asking bigger questions. I think this play is about art – about creation. The deep compulsion to stick your finger into something and the self knowledge to know when to leave it alone. The recognition of beauty in the incomplete. But now I’m starting to talk about the cake. We’re still at the cracking of the egg. Back to work.
Gregory Prest, Philip Carey Of Human Bondage
• T hough
too old for active service in the First World War (1914-1918), Maugham served in the British Red Cross’s so-called Literary Ambulance Drivers. He proof-read the galleys of Bondage during a lull in his duties. Here he also met the love of his life, Gerald Haxton. In 1917 he was sent on special mission for British Intelligence to curb Bolshevist tendencies in Russia. He liked to say if he’d had a few more months on the job, the Revolution would never have happened.
• T he
original title of the novel was Beauty from Ashes. The title he ultimately chose was taken from a passage in Spinoza’s Ethics. “The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master... so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he see the better before him.”
• M augham
had a bone-dry sense of humour. One of his most quoted lines is: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”