Gilbert is Dead – The Play
The play
Robin French, writer of Gilbert is Dead, in conversation with shiningman on why he wrote the play:
MY PARENTS used to drag me round Birmingham Art Gallery as a child. The collection of pre-Raphaelites were nothing on what happened next. After the life sized T-Rex (amazing), I went into a room packed with exotic stuffed animals. The corpses were trapped behind glass, dead but made to look alive, they stared at me with their glass eyes. They were macabre. They were thrilling. They gave me nightmares.
Then, twenty or so years later, I spent several strange and glum weeks in Swiss Cottage Library reading about wildlife, evolutionary psychology, extinction, the life of Darwin, Victorian explorers. The best thing I read was Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (magic theatre…) and after that this play gradually started to appear. Having started, it felt like a compulsion and quite often a curse – but I lived with it for a long time in my mid-twenties. I probably made everyone close to me suffer too.
I’m extremely grateful to director Robert Wolstenholme for believing in the play for so long, and sacrificing so much time to help it reach you.
2009 marks both the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seismic work On the Origin of Species.
To celebrate both, we are producing the shiningman’s second show, Gilbert is Dead by Robin French.
The play is a tragi-comedy about evolution. Set in London in the early 1860s, we follow eminent taxidermist Lucius Trickett, who finds himself on a mission from Queen Victoria to help explorer Gilbert Shirley find the mysterious ghost loris – a primate that proves Darwin’s theory wrong and thus that God exists…
Writer – Robin French
Studied modern and medieval languages at Cambridge University and playwriting on the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme.
Plays include: Bear Hug (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and subsequent productions in Italy, Germany, Ireland and Poland), Africa and Pigeon (Flight 5065 on the London Eye), and Breakfast Hearts/Choirplay (Theatre 503).
Robin was chosen by The Observer as one of the country’s most promising talents and is currently under commission from Paines Plough.
Television includes: co-writing with Evening Standard critic Kieron Quirke: Trinity (eight part drama, begins 20 September 2009 on ITV2), Roommates (13 part sitcom, ABC Family, to be aired 2009), Bash (sitcom pilot) and I Dream (both BBC); script editor on two series of Man Stroke Woman for Golden Globe winning producer Ash Atalla.
Robin has twice been named a ‘hot-shot writer’ by Broadcast magazine.
‘Blazingly funny, intensely disturbing and audaciously ambitious…’ The Times (on Bear Hug).
Gilbert is Dead
Directed by Robert Wolstenholme
4th-29th November
Tuesdays – Sundays 7.30pm
Sundays 4pm
For more information and press tickets please contact us