Orpheus is a first for St Paul’s School: a full-length devised production featuring extensive interaction with film shot and edited by students.
The play has so far involved the work of fifty students from St Paul’s, be it as actors (stage and film), storyboarders, film crew, sculptors, tattoo and stencil designers, film editors, image-sourcers, photographers or lighting designers.
After a three-month period of film development, the staged part of the production was devised at the breakneck speed of five weeks with the play presented as work-in-progress to audiences at the school 24-28th February 2011.
From the feedback received from these performances we are working on producing a revised, slimmer and more polished version of the play for presentation at the Edinburgh Festival between 5th and 13th August 2011.
Taking inspiration from Cocteau's 1949 film of the same name, Orpheus radically re-works the myth of the artist who descends to the underworld to rescue his deceased wife, taking as great liberties with the film as Cocteau took with the original Greek myth.
A chance encounter with a man on the run, a heavily tattooed corpse and a stranger who might just be Death himself. Three glimpses into a world that is strange, dangerous, exciting and far from Oliver's everyday existence. Oliver is about to embark on a journey that will tear apart his whole identity, but his isn't the only life that will be affected by the decisions he makes.