Always on
This project successfully funded on 29th July 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
This project successfully funded on 29th July 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
Emily Carding and Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir of Brite Theater desperately need funds for a third interactive solo Shakespeare - Timonopoly!
"Come Fortune! Let’s play a game. It’s only money... Inspired by Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare’s least known works, Timonopoly is a unique experience, a game, a show, an event. Come take your chance with Fortune. Let’s see how easily any of us can fall through the cracks of society... whoops! Brite Theater (Deliverance) continue to push the immersive envelope, creating ever more daring audience-specific work and bold adaptations of classical material. The long-anticipated final instalment of the Coward Conscience trilogy, following Richard III (a one-person show) and Hamlet (an experience)."
Promised funds, for reasons we can't divulge as they involve people's personal lives and mental health, are not appearing. We therefore need your help to pay for every aspect of production. Funds will go towards rehearsal time, game design, props and costume, fuel to get to and from venue, marketing and all that jazz.
A bit more about the show:
Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare’s least know works but one which is perhaps more relevant than ever in terms of themes of human connection vs. isolation, materialism and misanthropy. With Fortune as a powerful force throughout the play, referred to frequently as a personified force, the play presents an opportunity to show how easily any of us can fall through the cracks of society. However, it also presents many challenges in adaptation which would be best met through freedom and time to explore during a residency.
In 2014 Richard III (a one person show), Brite Theater’s most successful production to date, was developed during a residency which allowed us to hone the text by taking time to deeply examine the character of Richard as found in the text and then finding the most focused and accessible textual choices which told that character’s story. It also enabled, through an open studio process, the experimentation in innovative audience participation techniques which were immersive yet simple, and gentle yet powerful. This resulted in a show which continues to tour internationally to this day and has won multiple awards and nominations. Our following show, Hamlet (an experience) was simpler to put together textually and also benefitted from an open studio process to hone the audience interactions, pushing the boundaries of those interactions further by centring the audience’s experience and creative choices, creating a show which was truly unique to each audience.
Timon of Athens will be the third in this trilogy of shows, and the hope is to find even more new ways to engage the audience, giving them even greater agency and increasing the stakes of their involvement. The text does not, however, lend itself easily to the format of our previous shows, where a performer plays the central character and the audience take on the other roles. Our current concept is a gameshow format which begins as a Monopoly-inspired boardgame and grows into a gameshow format with creative and increasingly surreal tasks assigned to the audience. Emily Carding will play a Host character who is ‘Fortune’s Fool’, who will morph into other characters as necessary to tell the story, the order of events sometimes being influenced by audience’s gameplay. We hope to use this game/show to talk about how easy it is for anyone to slip through the gaps in society if support is not provided. It’s an excitingly original concept for Shakespearean adaptation and will draw on other Shakespearean plays and sonnets as well as original and ad-libbed material in order to tell the story in an entertaining and groundbreaking way.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made