12 March, 2015

MY PERFECT MIND TRANSFERS TO NEW YORK!

Photo by Hugo Glendinning
We are delighted to announce officially that, after two triumphant London seasons, national tours and performances in Barcelona, My Perfect Mind will be heading to New York this summer. The show has been invited to the annual Brits off Broadway Festival at 59E59 Theaters, ‘the number one off-Broadway destination in New York City’. The show will run in Theater A for three weeks from 10th to 28th June. Tickets are on general sale from today. BOOK NOW.
This extraordinary story seems like the invention of a daring playwright. Only it happens to be true. It is told by actors – only this time the pivotal role is played by the unique real-life person who lived and survived this terrible ordeal. To blend the real and the invented into one whole, that at every moment rings true, is an impossible challenge. Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter and Kathryn Hunter, their director, have made it alive, very funny and heart-wrenching. PETER BROOK
This show about not playing King Lear is a unique treat: a wondrous mosaic of a great actor’s self-analysis, his talents for vaudeville and tragedy, his wisdom and his passion. En route, he illuminates Shakespeare and as in all the best theatre, leaves us moved, shifted into a world we could not have imagined unless he had led us there. IAN MCKELLEN
Edward as the Fool for the Actors’ Company
It is just over forty years since Edward made his New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974, playing the Fool in King Lear for the Actors’ Company which he co-founded with Ian McKellen. Edith Oliver of the New Yorker declared: ‘Edward Petherbridge’s heartbroken, quicksilver fool … is the Fool forever; the part IS permanently his.’ In the 1980s, he appeared in two epic productions on Broadway: as Newman Noggs in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s landmark Nicholas Nickleby and as Charlie Marsden in Eugene O’Neill’s experimental Strange Interlude. Both performances earned him Tony Award nominations and the latter a Drama Desk Award nomination. He has also brought to New York two of his own productions, the first of them his vaudeville adaptation of R. D. Laing’s Knots. Now Edward returns to New York with an inspired masterpiece that showcases, as the Telegraph noted last autumn in its five-star review, the ‘tremendous sense of majesty that makes him a magnetic stage presence’.

Watch a ten-minute FT Arts featurette about My Perfect Mind.