Josie Lawrence and Joe McGann lead the cast in the first UK production of American literary icon Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding. The Print Room rounds off a year of bold and innovative theatre, dance, poetry and film with this perceptive and surprisingly witty story about a family trying to take death into their own hands.
Set in the sprawling south-western American desert, at the frontier between the man-made and the wilderness, artist Alex Macklin has abandoned his easel to make monumental land art. A second major stroke renders him speechless and motionless. He is kept alive only by feeding and hydration tubes and his desperate fourth wife. Then Alex’s second wife and his only son, who has been online researching ways to end his father’s life, arrive to decide his fate. With jet black humour, profound insight and moving sensitivity, DeLillo discusses one of our most urgent contemporary debates – what does being alive mean?
Don DeLillo, whose work includes White Noise and Underworld, and whose fans range from Salman Rushdie to Kate Tempest, has received awards and nominations for over 40 prizes including the Pulitzer, PEN/Faulkner and Man Booker International Prize. An incisive and almost prophetic thinker about American society, DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding, written in 2005 long before the public conversation about euthanasia became mainstream, is no exception.
The play will be directed by Jack McNamara, who has a long history with author Don DeLillo, and is the only director in the UK to have staged his work. His production of DeLillo’s play Valparaiso received five star reviews across the board and helped win a Peter Brook/Empty Space Award for the venue. His world premiere of DeLillo’s environmentalist play The Word for Snow sold out during its run at the Southbank Centre.
Love-Lies-Bleeding is at Print Room at The Coronet 9th November to 8th December 2018.
