OWE Production 2022/23

Original photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.
'A truly amazing piece of work. So original and such a brilliant way of looking at people and what they do to each other... 
A fierce recommendation.' 
(Emma Thompson).
​
Two people connect, ostensibly as therapist and client. Their subsequent intimate relationship seems to transgress all professional boundaries – but is it real?  And in what ethical and existential senses does that really matter? 
 
Laurie Slade’s hugely performative and urgent new two-hander is an interrogation of power in therapeutic relationships as well as a celebration of the creative and erotic imagination. How can two people truly, really, rawly connect? As therapist and client? As performers? As lovers? Or simply as dreamers…?  And with what potential implications in the ‘me-too’ era?
Informed equally by the playwright’s long experience in theatre and as a practising psychotherapist, Supermoon is a seventy-minute sliding-doors rollercoaster in the tradition of (Anthony) Schaffer’s Sleuth; (Peter) Schaffer’s Equus; Payne’s Constellations and Mamet’s Oleanna, with a touch of Koltes’s In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, while offering its own unique take on the quests for a fulfilling, shared, intimate reality, and with power as the dangerous mediator

SUPERMOON
by Laurie Slade
'A truly amazing piece of work. So original and such a brilliant way of looking at people and what they do to each other... A fierce recommendation.' 
Dame Emma Thompson
​
A Forthcoming Presence Production in 2022

Original photo by Luka Huter on Unsplash.

Does it really matter if you have a meaningful affair with your therapist....
...but for that matter what does real mean?

Supermoon is an innovative, incisive and extravagently performative new two-hander by dramatist and psychotherapist Laurie Slade.  A tempestuous love story and a thrilling theatrical rollercoaster, it asks questions about convergences between art, psychotherapy, performance, dreaming and desire, and about the power-nexus insinuating them all. Most of all, it is about the possibility of love and of profound human connection, explored in ways that are deliciously, slily and at times gloriously theatrical; boldly innovative yet fully accessible for audiences.  In its sensitivity to the ethics of power relations and its emphasis on the conditions of  human intimacy, it strikes a very contemporary chord as we emerge from the spectre of a  socially-distancing pandemic and in the stark light generated by the me-too movement. Also, in its celebration of the utility and joy of performance in general and of all the arts of the theatre in particular, it finds its moment in a world so recently starved of both.

Presence is proud to be making Supermoon one of our beacon projects for 2022/3, with a view to presenting a fully-achieved professional production at a high-profile Off-West End venue some time in the latter part of the year, directed by Presence Joint Artistic Director Colin Ellwood.  We are pleased and honoured to have been already in receipt of significant funding and are now looking to build a consortium of patrons, investors and supporters both private and public to help realise the project's full potential.  We are also in the process of assembling a very strong creative and production team (see below and with new additions announced via this page).

We also hope to be posting other features via this webpage related to the project and the issues it explores.

If you feel you can support us in any way, or would simply like more information or have a question, we would love to hear from you

And if you would like to have updates on new material curated here about the project, then do please contact us via the contact tab in the contents bar at the top of this site

Feedback on a workshop presentation of an earlier version of the script:

‘Saturday was a triumph in terms of your production and I felt really proud to be able to host it.’
(Jane Ryan – Director, Confer conferences)

‘A brilliant depiction of therapist/patient love and the temptations that push us to question limits. Slade illustrates the pressures on the therapist and patient (each differently) with subtlety and insight... riveting.’ 
​(Andrea Celenza – Psychoanalyst, Author of Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (2014)

‘I just gobbled it up - with wry smiles of recognition, laughs-aloud, gasps at the multiplicity of twists and turns and appreciation for the thoughtful intelligence that fuels it. Makes the audience think too, not just about therapy of course but about the fantasies and realities of any relationship. I love the fact that it can be for any M andF combination.’ 
(Ann Shearer – Jungian analyst – Author of Why Don’t Psychotherapists Laugh? (2016)

More than half the audience feedback to Confer rated the performance ‘Excellent’ or ‘Very Good’.
‘Absolutely amazing.’
‘Fantastic reflection of what is real and what isn’t – or both.’

Presence Theatre is a Company Limited by Guarantee 
Registered in England & Wales no. 6315043
Registered Charity no. 1132900