Hydrocracker - The New World Order

The New World Order
	November 16 to December 11 at Shoreditch Town Hall, London as part of The Barbican autumn season. The first ever performance of Pinter's works in Hackney, his home borough.
	by Harold Pinter Directed by Ellie Jones	"Both Pinter and site-specific theatre emerge as winners from Hydrocracker's deeply unsettling 75-minute piece played out in the dizzying heights and dank depths of Brighton Town Hall. "It takes its audience on a sinister journey from the oak-panelled council chamber, where the silky new minister of culture (Hugh Ross, superb throughout) is being questioned by toothless journalists about his government's ruthless policies to silence dissent, down into the bowels of the building where the dirty work is carried out. "Ellie Jones's cunning production, a logistical as well as an artistic triumph, takes five of Pinter's short political plays written from the mid-1980s onwards, and presents them within a fractured but entirely coherent framework. it becomes clear you are simply seeing your own world one step beyond the security measures demanded by the war on terror. Lyn Gardner, The Guardian	"This brilliant production.. leaves you with no doubt that it has something important to say about the world we are living in today, and not an ounce of shyness about saying it." www.fringeguru.com	"Hydrocracker’s revival of its 2007 production, drawing on five of Harold Pinter’s political plays, is a profoundly disturbing experience...claustrophobic, politically hard-hitting and beautifully performed." William McEvoy, The Stage
	Reviews from Brighton Festival May 7th to May 29th, 2011
	Five short plays by Harold Pinter: One for the Road, The New World Order, Precisely, Mountain Language, Press Conference.			Watch The Guardian's video report on The New World Order here

With Kate Dyson, Beth Fitzgerald, Richard Hahlo, Hugh Ross, Ross Sutherland, Matthew Wait, Jem Wall and a local community cast.

Designer: Sound Design: Lighting Designer: Movement Director: Assistant Director: Hydrocracker Producers:	Ellen Cairns Thor McIntyre-Burnie Tim Mascall Vik Sivalingam Marie Lager Richard Hahlo, Jem Wall		Community Cast: Michael Adams, Rosie Akerman, Amyn Ali, Julia Asling, Monica Battaglia, Russell Barnett, Jim Calderwood, Terence Drew, Matthew Grant, Tegen Hitchens, Annie Jackson, Felicity Jane, Tamar K. Karpas, Lis Long, Imogen Miller Porter, Adam Newington, Jack Roberts, Murray Simons, Louise Taylor, Jade Weighell, Matt Weyland, Lily Whiteside. Community Cast, Boys: Pablo Cano Carciofa, Jonah Garrett-Bannister

Watch The Guardian's feature on The New World Order below...
		Hydrocracker's chilling promenade performance of five Pinter short plays premiered at Brighton Festival in 2007. In 2011, it has made a timely return during Aung San Suu Kyi's Festival directorship of this year's Brighton Festival. Staged not in the theatre, but a real government building, this darkly compelling production takes its audience on a journey - literally and metaphorically - from the lofty council chambers to the labyrinthine depths below, where the functionaries of the new world order 'keep the world clean for democracy'. Harold Pinter was arguably the greatest British dramatist of his age; he was also our foremost chronicler of political injustice. Played out through five miniature masterpieces, this intimate and immersive performance draws us into the heat of the action, transforming us from passive viewers to complicit witnesses of covert menace and corrupt power. Chosen for The Guardian’s ‘Pick of the Year’ in 2007, The New World Order Order is an examinaton of political oppression, torture, and the mechanics of what is done ‘in our name’. For more information on production timescales, tour participation or costings, please contact ArtsAgenda by email info@artsagenda or by phone on +44(0)1273 626519
Produced by:


The 2007 show
2007 production directed by Ellie Jones	With Kate Dyson, Beth Fitzgerald, Gabriel Floyd, Sam Gledhill, Richard Hahlo, Hugh Ross, Dominick Rickhards, Ross Sutherland, and Jem Wall	Definitions of theatre (in 2007) also continued to expand... I yearn for an alliance between formal experiment and rich content. Three examples pointed the way... Ellie Jones's conflation of Pinter's short political pieces, A New World Order, took us on an extraordinary journey into the murky depths of Brighton Town Hall. Michael Billington, December 2007 The Guardian Pick of the Year
Brighton Festival May 2007 Brighton Town Hall Old Prison Cells
Set and Costume Design by Ellen Cairns Sound Design by Thor McIntyre-Burnie Lighting Design by Clare O'Donoghue	Production Manager: Mark Shayle Stage Manager: Esther Armstrong Stewards Co-ordinator: Siou Hannam
Stewards: Natasha Newington, Adrian Spring, Giselle Schiniou, Mat Beaumont, Martin Kelly, Maria Pullen, Andy Small, Andrea Folyon, Gina Martin, Alex Beales Chaperone: Lucie Fitchett	Brighton Festival production: Jane McMorrow, Matt Lyndon Jones, Philip Morgan, Tanya Ashdown Co-producers for Hydrocracker: Richard Hahlo and Jem Wall

A brilliant collage of Pinter's political plays that takes the audience on a journey into the maze-like prison beneath the city's town hall... "The collection of Pinter plays, superbly directed by Ellie Jones for Hydrocracker, is both disturbing and timely. Like the Belarus Free Theatre, which recently appeared in Leeds, Jones skilfully interweaves Pinter's plays about political oppression. "The result is far more than a tourist's-eye view of torture. In the final scene from One for the Road, we notice that Ross's state agent is scanning a British daily. And, out on the street, we are handed a fact sheet about Omar Deghayes: a Brighton law graduate who was arrested in Pakistan and who is now detained in Guantánamo Bay. An unnerving coda to a shattering experience that brings Pinter's world directly home." Michael Billington, *The Guardian*		"Whatever you think of One for the Road, Mountain Language, Precisely, Press Conference and The New World Order – and recent events have left me thinking them horribly apt – they gain from being cut into each other and presented in a walkabout that begins in a posh council chamber and ends in the building’s sinister catacombs. "Grandees blithely debate mass murder while guard dogs savage old women, sadists hover over hooded men and a whisky-swilling minister sneers at a broken husband and wife. Topical? Surely so." Benedict Nightingale, The Times
"Site-specific theatre used to often mean devised theatre, stronger on the visual and physical rather than the text. But traditional texts are increasingly being used by companies in found spaces and venues. And so it is that an enterprising company called Hydrocracker has secured the rights to stage several of Harold Pinter's miniature pieces, including One For The Road, Precisely and The New World Order, in corridors and the council chamber of Brighton Town Hall." The Guardian		"Indoors it was a different, far more impressive story. One of the festival’s main in-house offerings is a lavish site-specific rendering of a batch of short political plays by Harold Pinter – grouped under the collective title of The New World Order. "This embarrassment of tyrannies absolutely lays Pinter open to the charge of being heavy-handed and repetitive in his later writing, but rather than lessening their impact, the evening renews one’s admiration for his consistency of outrage. "The voices we hear are English, the insinuation is clear: unspeakable things are done in our name, and if we don’t speak out, they could also end up happening here, under our noses. Dominick Cavendish, Daily Telegraph