Victoria White

'STATE UNBORN, 2144C.E.', an adaptation of William Shakespeare's 'The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar'.

“How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown?”

...exclaims Cassius as he lathers his arms in the blood of the murdered Caesar. Even in this most frenzied of moments, precedent, and the presence of future histories is felt. The murder performed on the Ides of March by the conspirators of the Capitol is not an event of singular brutality, but an inevitable and enduring stain on human nature that is to be enacted across cosmoses and galaxies, past, present and future.

Two thousand one hundred years hence, in the year 2144C.E., in State Unborn, a police state not so dissimilar to Rome, there rules another Caesar and there festers a conspiracy to see him killed. Once again, violent libertarians must put an end to another tyrannical dictator-king.

'Fin de Siecle', an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina'.

In a desperate, terrible moment of private tragedy, overwhelmed by the great impossibility of her situation and without hope for the future, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is pulled inexplicably towards the railway. In her final moments of life she is torn by both the desire to live and to die.

Yet, the death of Anna Karenina represents far more than the ending of one woman; this is the fin de siècle of 19th century Russia; the ending of an entire age and social system. Westernized Russia, like Anna, is hurtling towards its denoument; a cataclysmic crushing of the frills and fuss of 19th century high society under the wheels of modernist thought and the boot of revolution. All that was once thought valuable or personally significant will soon become obsolete.

The Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company's 'JULIUS CAESAR'.

Julius Caesar is Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company's biggest production yet. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous play is set in the context of the 1950s New York mob and explores power struggle, hierarchy, and inherited violence. Mob boss Julius Caesar is popular and loved by those beneath him. Afraid that Caesar may strive towards over-reaching rule, his closest friends conspire to kill him. The warfare that ensues displaces the mob from everything that is familiar to them.

With fifty costumes described by reviewers as "gloriously evocative", this was certainly a challenging, but endlessly rewarding production.