From Tuesday 2nd June to Saturday 13th June the basement of Liverpool’s iconic Cunard Building will be transformed into a Subterranean Theatre when ‘The Maurie’, a new site-specific play, is performed as part of Culture Liverpool’s One Magnificent City programme of events celebrating the Cunard Shipping Line.
‘The Maurie’, written by Mike Morris, Co-Director of Liverpool’s popular literature and culture organisation; Writing on Wall, is an immersive and engaging piece of theatre which celebrates the lives and conflicts of the stokers who worked in the engine room of The Mauretania, sister ship of the torpedoed Lusitania.
‘The Maurie’ has been adapted from a 1920’s short story of the same name, written by a re-discovered Merchant Seaman, and activist George Garrett, the subject of an extensive and successful Heritage Lottery Fund Project.
George Garrett (1896-1966), a Liverpool born Merchant Seaman, travelled the world and wrote a series of short stories, stage plays and documentary reports about poverty and struggle in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Garrett showed George Orwell around Liverpool when Orwell was researching his seminal work on unemployment in the 1930’s, The Road To Wigan Pier.
By transforming the basement of the grade 2 listed Cunard Building into an engine room, ‘The Maurie’ will delve into the underbelly of the mighty ‘Scouse Boat’; The Mauretania, and will offer the audience a chance to tour the rooms of The Cunard Building as the play leads them through the lives of those who powered the mighty ships, glimpsing into the preserved basements of the building which echo the stokeholds of the ships that first crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
After hundreds and thousands of people descend upon Liverpool to witness the three Queen ships on the River Mersey, Subterranean Theatre: The Maurie will be a theatrical highlight of the One Magnificent City celebrations.
Writer Mike Morris says: ‘It’s incredibly exciting to be dramatising George Garrett’s short story, The Maurie, based on his time as a Stoker on the Mauretania. Garrett described the scene in the engine rooms of the Mauretania as a Subterranean Theatre, and it’ a fitting tribute to Garrett, and the Stokers who laboured below decks in almost inhumane conditions to keep these incredible liners running, that their contribution to Liverpool’s maritime history is recognised as part of the city’s One Magnificent City celebrations.’
The play is directed by Carl Cockram (The Quiet little Englishman, Waiting for Brando), and features popular Liverpool actors Paul Duckworth (Backbeat, 1994; (Reds & Blues: The Ballad of Dixie & Kenny, 2010), Joe Shipman, Nick Birkenshaw, Graham Hicks, Ben Worth and Bradley Thompson.
Tickets available www.georgegarrettarchive.co.uk. Also from Liverpool Philharmonic Box Office 36 Hope St, L1 9BP. 0151 709 3789. £15/£10 concessions
For further information Contact Mike Morris:
[email protected] 07841830628
For further information Contact Mike Morris: [email protected] 07841830628
Categories: 2015 | Archive | One Magnificent City | Ticketed
