‘The Lord is making London ‘like a fiery furnace’! In his wrath, he devours and swallows up our habitations.’
- God’s Terrible Voice in the City, by Thomas Vincent (1667)
As the Great Fire raged, crowds gathered and cried aloud through the narrow streets that the French were invading, the Dutch throwing fireballs, the Catholics plotting. There was no way to verify anything, so rumour and suspicion ran riot. Enraged Londoners grabbed foreigners and beat them in the streets. Myriad reasons for the great disaster were set forth.
In Scene 8 - Marketplace - of And London Burned, a crowd gathers and one speaker after another offers their theories of cause and culpability. The people get worked up to a hysterical pitch of blame that moves from the Dutch to the French to the Quakers, and culminates in the cry ‘God’s Wrath!’ We're working on making the Marketplace a scene of whirl and change, with the singers switching characters to give the sense of a crowd.
Rehearsal photograph by Chris Christodoulou. Left to right: Raphaela Papadakis (London), Andy Rupp (diseased vagrant), Gwilym Bowen (numerologist), Aoife O'Sullivan (young wife).
- God’s Terrible Voice in the City, by Thomas Vincent (1667)
As the Great Fire raged, crowds gathered and cried aloud through the narrow streets that the French were invading, the Dutch throwing fireballs, the Catholics plotting. There was no way to verify anything, so rumour and suspicion ran riot. Enraged Londoners grabbed foreigners and beat them in the streets. Myriad reasons for the great disaster were set forth.
In Scene 8 - Marketplace - of And London Burned, a crowd gathers and one speaker after another offers their theories of cause and culpability. The people get worked up to a hysterical pitch of blame that moves from the Dutch to the French to the Quakers, and culminates in the cry ‘God’s Wrath!’ We're working on making the Marketplace a scene of whirl and change, with the singers switching characters to give the sense of a crowd.
Rehearsal photograph by Chris Christodoulou. Left to right: Raphaela Papadakis (London), Andy Rupp (diseased vagrant), Gwilym Bowen (numerologist), Aoife O'Sullivan (young wife).
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