Purcell the Musical

The team that brought you Practically Imperfect, What the Dickens?, Creating Carmen, Breaking the Rules and Into the Melting Pot is back!

Award-winning music and theatre company, The Telling presents Purcell, The Musical, a play with music by award-winning writer Clare Norburn and BAFTA-nominated BBC director, Nicholas Renton (Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Musketeers, Lewis).

1695: in his final illness, composer Henry Purcell is suffering from feverish hallucinations. His bedroom transforms into a theatre and the past, present and fantasy collide. As Purcell revisits his childhood and early romance with his wife, his life-story becomes tangled up with his role as London’s leading theatre composer.

Interwoven into the drama are Purcell’s compositions which take on a life of their own: from bawdy theatre ballads and joyful celebrations of love, to slow airs, a ‘mad song’,and numbers from his semi-operas.

Niall Ashdown (Creating Carmen, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The Comedy Store Players) stars as Purcell alongside five actors and actor-musicians.

Supported by a grant from Continuo Foundation and The Grimmitt Trust.