Red Shift Theatre Company

Dickens’ classic of heroism, espionage and revenge is thrillingly reimagined by multi- award-winning writer-director Jonathan Holloway. The show makes its European premiere direct from an acclaimed Hong Kong season.

This powerful ensemble production relocates the story in the present day, shunning cosy Dickensian theatricality in favour of a world of shadows and fakery. Six actors in a sea of empty chairs and discarded shoes recall ‘the disappeared’. Here, there are no wigs, no period frippery and very few of Dickens' original words. Dickens' well-thumbed classic is hurled into the arena of duplicitous hotel room fixers and secret assignations that reverberate through a lifetime.

Playwright and director Jonathan Holloway comments, This Tale of Two Cities is just what Dickens would have wanted in 2016. He was a social campaigner, a romantic, an unconventional artist and a polymath who adapted and performed his own work for live audiences. He was committed to watertight narrative and a populist who knew audiences think they know what they want, when what they really want is to be taken by surprise.

Original music underscores an exquisitely designed production building on the success of 2015’s UK/Hong Kong Chung Ying collaboration with Jekyll & Hyde. A group of accomplished UK artists including Graeme Rose, Nicki Hobday and Eric Maclennan has once again been recruited to create work of international standing with one of Hong Kong's most impressively ambitious and accomplished theatre companies. The show is created and presented with the UK's legendary Red Shift Theatre Productions, and Olivier Award winning producers Seabright Productions.