Customs and Duty (George Szirtes)

Contact: info@marchlandseason.co.uk

A session of shows exploring the interaction between folk culture and high art, and how identities shift when the lines between arbitrarily imagined communities are blurred.

Fritz and the Bohemian
Each year, on the first day of Spring, an itinerant musician comes to play beneath Fritz Kobus’ window. A tale of renewal and the kindness of strangers from 19th C Mitteleuropa. An episode from the novel L’ami Fritz by Erckmann-Chatrian. Adapted and performed by storyteller James Peacock and viola player Shiry Rashkovsky.

Before and After Schengen
We asked Hungarian born poet George Szirtes to write a sequence of poems in response to Spanish photographer Ignacio Evangelista’s After Schengen project. George and actors from the Marchland Arms Company present a staged performance of the result, The Marchland Arms snug becoming the kafka-esque border post of a once or future East-European regime.

Goethe in Alsace
A new one act play from Théâtre Volière re-imagining the encounter between Goethe and Frederika Brion, the pastor’s daughter who helped him to connect with the folk culture of Alsace. Shades of Giselle and, inevitably, Faust, as the young Goethe’s careless play-acting leads to an act of casual cruelty that will haunt him forever.

Entry: £15 - £20

Time: 11:30am