Beloved cult production ‘New Dawn Fades - A Play About Joy Division And Manchester’ to tour this Autumn
The play is set to tour this October.
Photo: Press
New Dawn Fades - A Play About Joy Division & Manchester has been spellbinding audiences ever since it debuted at 2013’s Greater Manchester Fringe Festival. This Autumn, the poignant production of proto-goth galore returns to stages across the country from 30th September to 31st October.
Joy Division… they’re a band that remains, simply, forever etched into the fabric of Manchester. Walk through Northern Quarter and you can’t avoid bumbling through flurries of Unknown Pleasures t-shirts, whilst murals of the late Ian Curtis stare through you from concrete eyes. Roll up to Old Trafford or the Etihad and you partake in various foul-mouthed refrains of the 1980 hit single Love Will Tear Us Apart. Visit any independent venue, and you will hear echoes of Peter Hook’s post-punk propulsion in the soundscapes of an up-and-coming outfit. Even the city’s buildings themselves — as much as they constantly shape-shift — seem to whisper with the same post-industrial melancholy which the group’s records had immortalised.
And yet, of course, Joy Division were only a band for four years (if that).
New Dawn Fades - A Play About Joy Division & Manchester is a production that understands — and wonderfully dramatises — the mammoth scope of Joy Division’s influence, as well as the intimate, lightning-in-a-bottle flashpoint of a tortured poet, a family splitting at the seams, an ambitious punk band blinded by beauty, and an eclectic record label all too ready to be swept up into an era-defining epoch.
Writer/director/actor Brian Gorman once again seeks to set the stage for a story that somehow manages to trace the end of one man’s life against the continuation of a much greater city-wide transformation.
The production will be touring extensively throughout October, a ‘shadowplay’ fit for the season. The full dates are listed below:
30th Sept/1st Oct: Cheltenham – Everyman Theatre + Exhibition
4/5th Oct: Manchester — RNCM +Exhibition
7th Oct: Coventry – The Albany Theatre + Exhibition
9th Oct: Chester – The Live Rooms
10th Oct: Manchester - RNCM + Exhibition
13/14th Oct: Birmingham – The Old Rep
15/16th Oct: Bury – The Met +Exhibition
17/18/19th: Oct Macclesfield — Cinemac
20th Oct: Sheffield – The Foundry
22nd Oct: Blackpool – The Grand Theatre
24/25th Oct: Altrincham – The Bowdon Rooms
27/28/29th Oct: London – The Bloomsbury Theatre + Exhibition
30/31st Oct: Leeds – City Varieties Music Hall
There will also be an exclusive Joy Division Equipment and Ephemera exhibition — no atrocity — at specific dates across the tour (listed above), where audiences will get to view artefacts of the real-life story up close and personal.
This is the way, step inside…
Tickets can be bought here.