28th February – 18th March 2012 (Tues-Sat 7:30pm, Sun 6pm)
“Ondine is strange, my lord. You saw her tonight in the storm. It’s not that she’s in the storm. She is the storm.”
When Hans and Ondine meet, the worlds of a mortal man and a magical creature of the water dangerously collide and Ondine is forced to make an inexorable pact, which will change both their lives forever. Should he betray her, he must die and, along with her time on earth, be erased completely from her memory for her to return to the world of the lake forever.
By turns comic, enchanting, and tragic, Ondine is believed to have been Giraudoux’s finest work. Written in 1938, the play was adapted in 1954 by Maurice Valency, and opened on Broadway in a production by Alfred Lunt with a cast that included Audrey Hepburn as Ondine, the role that made her a star. Ondine won the 1954 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. The London premiere of Ondine was presented by The Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Peter Hall in 1961. The White Bear and Lost in the Dark now present this enduring magical tale of tragic love in an exciting new production directed by Cat Robey.
Lost in the Dark is a new theatre company led by Elizabeth Merrick, who has a keen interest in both new writing as well as forgotten or foreign classics like Ondine.
