19:30, Thu 9th – Fri 10th May 2024 at Wilkins Room, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College
Easter Week 2
This specially commissioned new work, compiled and directed by theatre-maker Mia Hull and supported by the English Faculty's Judith E. Wilson Practice-as-Research Fund, stages an all-female (re)enactment of a Grave-Diggers Society playreading on the site of the Isherwood in Cambridge exhibition. But as the group reads its selected play—W.H. Auden and Isherwood's campy The Ascent of F6 about a group of men racing up a mountain to stop an imperialist war—it triggers an examination of where their leader's power stems from and whom Isherwood wants to align himself with: the Cambridge society of his classmates or the surrealist world he has created with his friend Edward Upward? This experimental piece is a meditation on historical reenactment, the nature of play readings, and what radical tenderness amongst schoolfellows looks like.
Part of the events surrounding the Isherwood in Cambridge exhibition at the Parker Library, celebrating the centenary of Christopher Isherwood's time at Corpus Christi College, curated by Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Conrad Steel.