Directed by Tom Cooper | Cast - Christina Gordon, Helen Logan
A tragicomedy about a young talented singer who teaches opera to a wealthy older lady with delusional ambitions.
Talented young singer Sarah is hanging on by the skin of her teeth.
Living where the paid gigs are is expensive, and she’s working all hours giving singing lessons and delivering takeaways to make ends meet.
When Marie, one of Sarah’s students, decides to embark on a singing career at retirement age, Sarah decides to not put her off and let Marie make her own mistakes.
However, this decision pulls Sarah deeper and deeper into Marie’s delusional fantasies and costs her more than she ever could have predicted.
Who Pays the Piper is a new tragicomedy exploring what it’s like to fall in love with music and who gets to make their ambitions into reality.
Cast
Creative Team
Writer: Jen McGregor
Director: Tom Cooper
Designer: Kenny Miller
Assistant Director: Debi Pirie
JEN MCGREGOR is a writer, dramaturg and director, trained at Mountview and mentored by Rob Drummond through Playwrights Studio. Her play Heaven Burns won the 2018 ART Award. Her credits include Divergent Sounds (City of London Sinfonia/Southbank Centre), Post Coal Prom Queen, Hidden Door’s Music for First Contact, and Matchmaker Theatre Productions’ The Real William Shakespeare… as told by Christopher Marlowe (EdFringe, touring). Jen's work explores themes of self-invention, death fear/death drive, and finding your place in a world in which you don't easily fit.
TOM COOPER is a Glasgow-based director and dramaturg, working across theatre, musical theatre and opera. Recent work includes the musical Big Fish (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland at Assembly Rooms), Part of the Picture (The Pleasance), Brecht’s The Visions of Simone Machard (Hackney Empire and tour); Gianni Schicchi (Opera Bohemia, Scottish tour); La Traviata (UK tour); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Blenheim Palace Gardens); Adam Guettel’s song cycle Myths and Hymns and N. C. Hunter’s play A Day by the Sea (Finborough Theatre, London).
