Candide

Description

All the world's an Xbox and you're a player Candide is an optimist. A dreamer. He believes that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But that belief is about to be tested as Candide's comfortable life is overtaken by an endless barrage of misfortune. First published in 1759, the story traces the journey of a young man who leads a sheltered life, believing that mankind lives in the best of all possible worlds and that everything happens for the best. But Candide's happiness comes to a sharp end when he is unfairly evicted from his uncle's castle for kissing his cousin and true love, Lady Cunegonde. Cast out into the big wide world, Candide is forced to confront reality. As his world collapses around him, we are transported across the centuries to new locations and parallel universes. How will Candide's optimism fare when it collides with life in the twenty-first century?

Mark Ravenhill is one of the most distinctive contemporary UK playwrights. He burst on to the theatre scene in 1996 with the huge hit Shopping and Fucking. He has continued to garner critical acclaim for plays that include Some Explicit Polaroids, Mother Clap's Molly House, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (National Theatre, Royal Court, Paines Plough, The Gate Theatre, April 2008), A Life in Three Acts, and Ten Plagues. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at the RSC. His adaptation of Brecht's A Life of Galileo was recently produced in the Swan Theatre.

Ravenhill has more to say, and says it more refreshingly and wittily, than any other playwright of his generation * Time Out * There are few stage authors writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill . . . He is . . . a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism. * Financial Times * An extraordinary piece, one that bulges with bright ideas * Guardian * ... fiendishly clever and full of ideas. * The Times * Mark Ravenhill's imaginative, fitfully entertaining 'response' to Candide for the Royal Shakespeare Company is a picaresque, playful, and provocative piece ... Staged with terrific panache and colour by Lyndsey Turner ... * Mail on Sunday *