imitating the dog, one of the UK’s most original and innovative performance theatre companies are delighted to announce full casting for the UK stage premiere for their bold retelling of Joseph Conrad’s extraordinarily influential and timely novel – Heart of Darkness.
The production’s ensemble will feature Laura Atherton (A Farewell To Arms, imitating the dog); Msimisi Dlamini (Soul Sister, West End and UK Tour; Spanish Tragedy, Arcola Theatre and Butterfly Lion, Curve Theatre Leicester); Keicha Greenidge (In The Club, Bafta winning Three Girls and From Darkness, all BBC); Morven Macbeth (A Farewell to Arms, imitating the dog; Bring The Happy, Invisible Flock and Opening Skinner’s Box, Improbable) and Matt Prendergast (The Train, imitating the dog).
Following on from their popular and critically acclaimed adaptation in 2014 of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, imitating the dog will stage an exploration of Conrad’s classic novel filled with visually rich, multi-layered work that fuses live performance and digital technology.
Written more than 100 years ago, amid the optimism at the turn of a new century, Heart of Darkness, which explored the journey of Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow travelling up the Congo river into the Congo Free State in the heart of Africa, is a tale of lies and brutal greed and of the dark heart which beats within us all. Now retold as the journey of a black woman through war torn Europe, the play explores a forsaken landscape lost to the destructive lust for power and emerges as a tale absolutely for our time.
Negotiating race, gender and the themes of exploitation, violence and nationalism, imitating the dog’s Heart of Darkness is a searing parable for our times, created at a moment when versions of Britain’s colonial past are being held up as a golden era and when our relationship to Europe is being severely tested.
Co-directed by imitating the dog’s co-founders Pete Brooks and Andrew Quick, Heart of Darkness will premiere in Italy at Marche Teatro’s Teatro Sperimentale in Ancona and then tour to Aberystwyth Arts Centre (16-17 November) and Birmingham Repertory Theatre (20-24 November). In 2019 the production will tour from March to May to Doncaster, Glasgow, Lancaster, Keswick, Newcastle, Didcot, York, Ipswich, Salford, Liverpool and Coventry.
