News / Latest News / London 2012 Festival commission
Thursday 20th January 2011
John Hardy is composing music for a production by National Theatre Wales and the Royal Shakespeare Company for the London 2012 Festival.
John will rejoin directors Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, and the rest of the NTW creative team behind the critically acclaimed, sold-out production of The Persians in summer 2010. The play was staged at a military base in the Brecon Beacons and described by The Telegraph as 'extraordinary, one of the most imaginative, powerful and haunting theatrical events of the year.' *****
The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad is 'the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements' and its culmination, the London 2012 Festival, involves over 1,000 events involving artists from across the world including Damon Albarn, Cate Blanchett, David Hockney, Akram Khan, Jude Law, Mike Leigh, James MacMillan, Toni Morrison and Peter Sellars.
The London 2012 Festival website lists the production:
Coriolan/us, directed by Mike Pearson, concept by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes - National Theatre Wales
From the National Theatre Wales team that created Aeschylus’s The Persians on the military training range of mid-Wales, the story of Caius Martius – Coriolanus – is re-imagined in the era of 24-hour news, celebrity culture, and a new global polity. Outside broadcasts from the battlefield, popular grievances straight to camera and audience participants as the body politic provide a ‘mash up’ of previous attempts to get to grips with a figure contrary and perplexing, ever contemporary and ever challenging of our beliefs.
Listen and read more about The Persians.
Read more about this news story from the BBC or Western Mail.