'You think I'm mentally retarded or too clever?... It's the same thing!'In her compulsive switching between love and hate, one woman crosses the fragile border between madness and sanity. Infanta: User's Guide, Saviana Stanescu's poignant latest play, raises issues of identity, morality and survival of the woman in the 21st century.
Saviana Stanescu is a well-known Romanian playwright resident in New York. Her plays: Waxing West (New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-Length Script), Black Milk (an English-Romanian anthology of four plays), The Inflatable Apocalypse (The Best Play of the Year 1999 UNITER Award) have toured Romania and the US and have entered the European theatrical circuit. She is currently the New York State Council on the Arts playwright-in-residence for Women's Project and writer-in-residence of the East Coast Artists.
The part of Infanta is played by Erika Blaxland-de Lange from the Pericles Theatre Company. Erika's previous credits include: Stephano in The Tempest by Shakespeare, Nora in A Doll's House by Ibsen, Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee and Strophe in Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane.
Romanian director Vasile Nedelcu graduated from the Bucharest National University of Drama and Cinematography. His production of Midsummer's Nights Dream by Shakespeare was selected among the best shows of the year 2002 at the National Theatre Festival in Romania. Previous directing credits in the UK include: Exit the King by Ionesco, Macbeth by Shakespeare, Platonov by Chekov for the Artemis Speech and Drama School and Peer Gynt by Ibsen for the Glasshouse Company. His Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen won Best Family Show at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2005.
The Romanian Cultural Institute supports the Infanta: User's Guide run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
When: 31 July-10 August, 7.05 pm (duration: 50 min, no interval)
Where: The Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Venue 170), 38 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9DB
Admission: free
