Adapted from Mark Twain

A Theatre Research Project

With actors Jan Martin & German Segal
Directed by Christopher Marcus
Dramaturgy by Andrew Upton

Last year was the 100 th anniversary of a series of lectures given to actors by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, known as the Speech and Drama Course. Steiner died six months later and was unable to further develop his indications to actors himself. His wife Marie Steiner, herself an actress, continued to work with the actors (particularly on the indications for speech) and Michael Chekhov went on to develop his own acting techniques inspired by Steiner, who he had met. However, the Course itself remains largely unknown and untested beyond a narrow circle of practitioners.

Our project began in March last year with the aim of researching anew the efficacy of Steiner’s Speech and Drama Course with actors as yet unfamiliar with it, via the process of creating a piece of theatre using his indications. A four-month training and devising process concluded in The Diaries of Adam and Eve - a dramatized synthesis of Mark Twain`s texts Adam’s Diary (1893) and Eve’s Diary (1905). In July we were invited to perform this piece at an international Theatre Festival at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, marking the centenary of Steiner’s lectures on speech and drama at the place where he had given them.

A year later, in this second edition of The Diaries of Adam and Eve with a new actor, we have been able to further research Steiner’s indications to actors. We have especially explored what Steiner calls ‘sound gestures’ and ‘sound qualities’, through which the actor allows the gestures and qualities of speech sounds to replace his/her subjective emotion in an artistic unity of sense and sensibility.

The production plans to tour in the autumn to various countries including Finland, Poland, Italy and UK.

From a review of The Diaries of Adam and Eve, July 2024

‘The undeniable modernity of what otherwise might remain a sacred myth shone through the whole conception of this production. The acting managed to transcend what could so easily have been the limitations of the expected male-female paradigm into a human representation of entirely natural masculine and feminine archetypes, at the same time delicately personal.’ — Andrew Wolpert

Tickets: £15/£10 at the door, Runtime: 1 hour