Hope and happiness in face of adversity

Derry’s year as the UK’s City of Culture will reach its theatrical apogee on September 20 with The Conquest of Happiness, a large-scale open-air show in the city’s Ebrington Square, directed by Haris Pasovic.

Pasovic, who famously produced Waiting for Godot during the Seige of Sarajevo, brought his East West company to Belfast a few years ago, sewing the seeds for his involvement in this production by Prime Cuts.

The Conquest of Happiness will use theatre, music and dance and a set made of army vehicles as it combines first-hand accounts and dramatisations of stories of conflict drawn from Northern Ireland, Chile, Bosnia, Palestine, Vietnam and elsewhere. Describing the spectacle, Pasovic says, “Theatre for me is about providing to the audience a new and exciting experience. My theatre is not a conventional one. It is bold, serious, funny, confronting. It is anything but boring.”