Notice Board

A Night at the Grand Guignol | April 22 & 23 | University Theatre | 7:30 pm 

Enter - if you dare - into the world of the Grand Guignol!

A Night at the Grand Guignol: 2022 is a curated evening of short plays that will have you squirming in your seat and shrieking with fear and delight. Performed on the University Theatre stage, April 22 and 23 at 7:30pm nightly, the Department of Drama invites you to join them for their final Mainstage of the 2021-2022 season.

The Grand Guignol, a theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris, specialized in horror-style variety performances from its opening in 1897 to 1962. The productions were notoriously spectacular, featuring naturalistic special-effects that was rumoured to induce fainting or vomiting among audience members. “This style of theatre has had short resurgences here and there, but it an often-forgotten chapter in theatre history,” says faculty member and director, Mia van Leeuwen.

Audiences will be led along a path of the macabre by an emcee who will weave together the stories of The Lighthouse Keepers by Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin, Kiss of Blood by Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, and an adaption of The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. Entertaining, fun, horrific, and grotesque, A Night at the Grand Guignol is a romp through a shifting landscape of assorted terrors.

“The first play, The Lighthouse Keepers, is a true psychological thriller,” says Department of Drama faculty and director, Jay Whitehead. “Isolation and claustrophobia are the main elements of horror in this piece and compliment the themes of the second play, Kiss of Blood.”

Campy, fun, and bloody, Kiss of Blood, a staged reading directed by Drama Department faculty, Justin Blum, is medical melodrama at its finest. Not for the faint of heart, this play features ghosts, gore, and a plot twist that will leave audiences gasping for more!

Familiar themes surrounding a fictitious plague are featured in the final play of the evening, a physical theatre retelling of The Masque of the Red Death. “It’s a piece about a pandemic, performed during a pandemic” says director, Mia van Leeuwen, “but it’s really an allegory about the denial of death and the inevitability that it will one day come for us all. In our version, we eventually dance with death, holding it close.”

Tickets to this very limited 2-night run of A Night at the Grand Guignol are available at the University Box Office (Monday – Friday, 12:30pm – 3:30pm) or online: ulethbridge.ca/tickets.
Tickets are $18 regular, $13 seniors and alumni, $12 students. University of Lethbridge students are eligible for one complimentary ticket with their student ID.

Haze and fog effects. Masking is mandatory.