Wednesday, October 16, 2019 – We are thrilled to announce our production of Daughter by Adam Lazarus will receive its London, England premiere at Battersea Arts Centre, as part of their Going Global 2020 season.

Daughter is a darkly satirical piece facing toxic masculinity head on, distilled into the figure of a very funny, engaging and troubled man. In 2018, The Theatre Centre’s co-production of Daughter (with QuipTake and Pandemic Theatre) became one of the most talked about shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Provoking passionate discussions from Toronto to Sydney and Somerset (Latitude Festival), Daughter will now have its London premiere at Battersea Arts Centre on Wednesday, March 4 – Saturday, March 28, 2020. Raising questions of culpability and complicity, Daughter examines the subtle and not-so-subtle ways misogyny is condoned and encouraged in society.

“This is an amazing opportunity for the show and for The Theatre Centre,” commented Aislinn Rose, The Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director. “I’m particularly excited to be back on the road with Adam; we have a long history working together that pre-dates my time at The Theatre Centre. Representing Canada in Battersea’s Going Global season is hopefully the beginning of a long relationship with their organization.

“Over the last few years, The Theatre Centre has put our resources into supporting artists moving their work beyond a first production. Internationally, we’ve seen huge interest in the work coming out of The Theatre Centre. Specifically, we’ve had a lot of success over the last two years in Edinburgh with the support of the CanadaHub initiative; it’s an incredible resource for Canadian artists to have their work seen within an international context. Daughter heading to Battersea Arts Centre is just the first of a number of exciting announcements to come!”

‘If theatre is meant to provoke a reaction, this is an absolute masterpiece’
★★★★★ Everything Theatre
‘powerful and unsettling’
★★★★ Lyn Gardner, The Independent
‘as insidiously clever as it is (eventually) difficult to watch’
​★★★★ The Sunday Times

Adam Lazarus plays The Father, an affable everyman; a figure for our amusement, dismay and judgement. The birth of his daughter is a turning point in his life’s journey thus far, and as he looks back at his past and recent behaviour, troubled, violent and shameful secrets start to burst through. It is from his powerful account of violence and searing remorse that we come to recognize the ingrained misogyny we see everywhere — within society, within our communities, and perhaps, for some of us, within ourselves.

Daughter has earned rave reviews for its candour, its daring, and its powerhouse solo performance. A riveting and thoroughly engaging performer, Adam Lazarus offers us a public display as an intimate and desperate confession and invokes the need for more of us to speak up. Written and performed by actor, director and Canada’s ‘bouffon-king’ Adam Lazarus, Daughter is co-created with Melissa D’Agostino, Jiv Parasram and Ann-Marie Kerr who also directs the show. The show was originally produced in 2017 by The Theatre Centre with QuipTake and Pandemic Theatre. This production of Daughter is part of BAC’s Going Global season which brings together the best of international performance and UK artists telling global stories.

‘Adam Lazarus drags his viewers wholly into his world; every confronting, squeamish or delighting moment is inescapable’
★★★★★ The Upcoming
‘blisteringly funny at times, but incendiary too, even brutal’
★★★★ The Arts Desk
‘boldly addresses the darkness eating away at men and the monstrous ways in which they exert power’
★★★★ The List

Tickets from £12.50-£20. All tickets sold in October 2019 at £10
Tickets available from Battersea Arts Centre

CAST & CREATIVES

Written and Performed by Adam Lazarus
Co-created with Ann-Marie Kerr, Melissa D’Agostino and Jivesh Parasram
Directed by Ann-Marie Kerr
Lighting design by Michelle Ramsay
Sound & composition design by Richard Feren
Contributing artists (development): Kate Alton, Rebecca Vandevelde, Sasha Theodora
Originally Produced in 2017 by The Theatre Centre, QuipTake, and Pandemic Theatre

ABOUT

ADAM LAZARUS
Adam Lazarus is an award-winning actor, director and acting instructor whose work has been showcased nationally and globally. Hailed as “Toronto’s favourite nasty clown” and “the bouffon King”, Adam’s collaborators are varied and vast as he brings a dark and comic sensibility to all his work. Adam is known for dynamic and implicating solo performances, including the international thought disrupter Daughter; the horror death-opera Bleed; the radical race oration The Art of Building a Bunker (co-written with Guillermo Verdecchia), and the vicious bouffon love play Wonderland. Adam has acted as a creation director for countless actors, musicians, speakers, comedians, dancers and performance artists, helping them to spark and form characters and narratives, worlds and images. He is a graduate of, and former apprentice to, master teacher Philippe Gaulier and in the fall of 2016, he launched PlayOn Theatre, a Toronto based theatre school with a focus on creation and performance.

ANN-MARIE KERR
Ann-Marie Kerr (director/co-creator) is an award-winning theatre director, actor and teacher currently working in residence at The Theatre Centre with Hannah Moscovitch and Maev Beaty. Her work, which has been presented nationally and internationally, includes recent directing credits: I, Claudia (Neptune Theatre); The Circle (Alberta Theatre Projects); Cathy Jones solo show Stranger to Hard Work (National tour); Cliff Cardinal’s The Anderson’s (National Theatre School and in development at Soulpepper). A graduate of L’École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris and York University in Toronto, Ann-Marie is the former Artistic Associate of Magnetic North Theatre Festival.

THE THEATRE CENTRE
The Theatre Centre (Toronto, Canada) is an internationally recognized live-arts incubator that serves as a research and development hub for the cultural sector. They are a public space, open and accessible to the people of their community, where citizens can imagine, debate, celebrate, protest, unite and be responsible for inventing the future. The Theatre Centre’s mission is to nurture artists, invest in ideas and champion new work and new ways of working.

BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE
Battersea Arts Centre is a public space where people come together to be creative, see a show, explore the local heritage, play or relax. The organisation’s mission is to inspire people, to take creative risks, to shape the future. Battersea Arts Centre encourages people to test and develop new ideas with members of the public – a process called Scratch. Scratch is used by artists to make theatre, by young people to develop entrepreneurial ideas and as a helpful process for anyone who wants to get creative.