Beautiful storytelling and live opera singing combine to reveal the heart behind a legend.

Written for Ignacio by Andrew G Marshall the play featues live music from Rossini, Puccini, Cilea and Tosti, and Direction and Dramaturgy from Miranda Henderson, the Prodigal Theatre director of the multi-award winning Tragedian Trilogy.

Marshall wrote the play after seeing Ignacio as Cariola in Prodigal’s Brighton Festival sell-out “Ten Thousand Several Doors”. “I overheard another playwright I know saying they could write a play just for him, and I thought, ‘Oh no you don’t!’” laughs Marshall.

True to Prodigal form the play is stripped back to the bare bones of scenography with just a few hand-props and a chair conjuring up a wealth of locations as Caruso fights, slogs and sings his away across a city in ruins.

Prodigal investigates the audience-performer relationship through defiantly theatrical stagings which are epic within a small frame. A philosophy of physical experiment and research has led the award-winning company from tightly framed in-the-round storytelling through promenade Jacobean tragedy and out onto the streets for a wordless drama of dance at speed and height. Current repertoire includes the multi-award winning solo Tragedian Trilogy (on the life of Edmund Kean – “a Dickensian Masterpiece”), the site-specific Ten Thousand Several Doors (after Webster “Duchess of Malfi meets Brighton Rock”), the dance-theatre quartet Queen of the Slaughter (on the theme of ideology “a series of Caravaggio paintings brought to life”) and the outdoor Parkour inspired The Urban Playground.

Founded in 1999 Prodigal has since 2004 been based at the Nightingale Theatre where it is the resident company under the patronage of Steven Berkoff.

Ignacio Jarquin is a singer / performer. His credits include 'Ten Thousand Several Doors' (winner of Best Show at Brighton Festival 2006) and 'Queen of the Slaughter' for Prodigal Theatre Company. His work has taken him to Egypt, Jordan, Holland, Spain, Italy and Germany.

Andrew G. Marshall's most recent play 'Modern Major General' was chosen as a pick of the day in the Independent and his other work includes 'Coming Around Again' (West Yorkshire Playhouse) published by Oberon. Andrew G. Marshall not only writes plays but also self-help books. His latest, I love you but I'm not in love with you is published by Bloomsbury and has been translated into fourteen different languages.

Quake by Andrew G Marshall, East Anglian Daily Times – 4 June 2008
Quake, New Wolsey Studio Tuesday 3rd June 2008, Andrew G Marshall
The Quake: A Play That Leaves Aftershocks long After The Event

Quake by Andrew G Marshall, East Anglian Daily Times – 4 June 2008

The Great Caruso

Pulse Festival: Quake by Andrew G Marshall at the Wolsey Studio, Tuesday, 3 June.

An engaging storyteller with a pleasing tenor voice Ignacio Jarquin delivers this one man, one-hour piece with enormous warmth.

We meet Enrico Caruso, the world famous Italian opera singer, as he perches on a tea chest on the dockside in San Francisco harbour, waiting for a ferry to take him away from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake.

He recounts the story of how the quake struck when he was in his hotel room after a performance of Carmen at the opera house.

He and his manservant Gilbert are woken up when the hotel begins to shake violently. The two men manage to escape the building before it collapses and make their way through the stricken, burning city to the water front where the diminutive man dubbed The Great Caruso waits for a boat to ferry him away from the choking dust that threatens to affect his precious vocal chords.

It is an undemanding piece of theatre which nonetheless holds the audience's interest from its beginning to its twist-in-the-tale end. Jarquin rolls his 'r's exotically and introduces us to a self-obsessed Caruso and a loyal but sardonic Gilbert.

We follow the two men through the ruins of the city as they encounter death and destruction on every street. Along the way, we learn of Caruso's journey from the poor tenements of Naples to the glittering heights of operatic super-stardom. He shows us the signed photograph President Theodore Roosevelt gave him in exchange for a quick aria.

As Caruso witnesses the human tragedies left in the wake of the earthquake he starts to realise there are bigger losses than a dressing room full of costumes.

Lynne Mortimer

Quake, New Wolsey Studio Tuesday 3rd June 2008, Andrew G Marshall

Quake shakes its way to Ipswich successfully!

Quake is about a famous tenor Caruso trapped in San Francisco during the 1906 Earthquake. He need to return home to the family but comes across some obstacles like trying to escape his collapsing hotel room, getting across the city that is covered in fire and trying to get past the military to catch the last ferry home will he make his ferry in time?

The opening of Quake is so funny; it makes you have tears of joy in your eyes. The lights were very effective with all the changes involved with the lighting. It made the production even better production. The movements that the one storyteller puts in the show make the show have depth which makes it’s a sheer delight to watch. Quake is so amusing, entertaining and such comedy with a deep detailed story to what it must have been like to have been there during that natural disaster.

There was one point in the show when the storyteller says about when he first had singing lesson thanks to cheese…the audience found this an extremely hilarious moment. Another point in the show the storyteller finds a little boy who has lost his mother. The storyteller ends up singing a song and a crowd gathers, he then asks if anyone knows this boy and his mother ends up coming forward. It was such a happy and moving moment in the show. A frozen spoken movement that the storyteller using a few times in the show is such a humorous freeze it makes you burst out laughing uncontrollable.

Quake is a must see if you like comedy and in-depth storytelling. It is also a good show for a solo actor and storyteller. The guy did extremely well to get every spot on in fifty five minutes. The five songs were amazingly sung. If you get the chance to go, get a ticket it is well worth the time.

By Craig Brinkley

The Quake: A Play That Leaves Aftershocks long After The Event

Like looking into a mirror that does not reflect what its sees, but what it knows is inside, ‘The Quake’ shows us the man within the man and the story within the story. And within that story the loosely reflected images of his life, hard to grasp, like trying to catch a Will-O’ the Wisp on a dark wintry night.

And it is a story beautifully told by Ignacio Jarquin in just one timeless hour at the Nightingale Theatre, above the Grand Central Pub, in the heart of Brighton.

Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), one of the greatest Tenors who ever lived, happened to be in San Francisco at the time of the infamous earthquake of 1906.

‘Quake’ by Andrew G Marshall is story based upon Caruso’s experiences at that time.

Well at first glance it is, but there is much more to it than that. The clue lies in the fact that that much of what Caruso ‘tells’ us about his post quake adventures in San Francisco, with his loyal servant Gilbert, in fact appears to be untrue. Essentially, Caruso admits at the very end of the play that the servant who is supposed to have come with him on his journey around the burning city actually died (as I had suspected), before Caruso even left the hotel.

And so the factual veracity of what he says must be called into question, at least in one sense.

Many of the stories of Homer’s Odyssey (the Cyclopes, The Lotus Eaters etc) are now thought to be Odysseus concocting or manipulating stories for his hosts, Nausikaa and her father King Alkinoos, and not a ‘genuine’ or straightforward recollection of events at all.

Well not genuine, but a still wonderful way of revealing what kind of man Odysseus was and also hinting at elements of his character, life and journey. His stories are so much more than a list of events. Each one, it seems, has metaphorical qualities. And so Caruso’s story, his ‘journey’ across the devastated city is in some sense a kind of Odyssey of its own. And like its forbear it tells us more about the storyteller than the events it purports to describe.

For example, Caruso talks of his meeting a small boy in the burning city, who cries into his coat tails. This reminds Caruso of the death of his mother, who lay mortally ill, while he sang at church. Caruso sings and a crowd draws around.

As a result the small boy’s mother miraculously appears, as if summoned by the maestro’s song and walks off with the boy into the crowd. This seems to be a metaphor for what Caruso wishes would happen to him, that the singing that deprived him of the last moments of his mother’s life (he was singing in church when she finally died) can somehow draw a mother back into the world to take her small lost boy home. He, I suspect, is the small boy.

I sense this is a story drawn from his inner-self. The family who share their bread with Caruso and Gilberts in the ‘story’ seem to be an idealised family, very unlike his own upbringing with a drunken father. Are they how he would like things to have been?

Gilbert is the idealised manservant, who loves his family and works to keep them, and is the opposite of Caruso's own father. The carrying of a huge trunk around the city that contains Caruso's favourite clothes collected on his journeys, is a metaphor for all the memories and events that have happened on Caruso’s life journey thus far.

In fact the whole saga of coming from disaster, through to freedom and escape, seems to be a kind of Odyssey-style metaphor for his whole life.

At least that’s how I see it. The parallels between this disaster and the current natural disasters in China and Burma were in all our minds as we watched this play, I think.

The manservant, Gilbert, says something about how man’s greed compounds nature’s destruction. He is talking about how the fire stations in the city were poorly built, and collapsed burying the fire-fighters, and how the money for pumps for the sea water had been taken up in bribes by the city mayor.

How reminiscent for us all of the schools in China that collapsed like cardboard while other private homes remained standing. And there is the Burmese Junta, using the Cyclone disaster to push through a new constitution while people are still dying of starvation and malnutrition.

It seems that while money remains more important than humanity, things will never change. Ignacio Jarquin is tireless man of many talents.

He is physically moving around the stage the whole time and he has a great voice, even rendering some of Puccini’s Tosca at one stage.

Above all he is Caruso, in his own head and in our minds. After a few minutes they become inseparable. His stage manner is highly watchable and his ability to render gags with perfect timing is flawless. The roars of approval as he took his bow were well deserved.