Littsburgh – Quantum Theatre’s latest production, Chatterton, is adapted from Peter Ackroyd’s bestselling and Booker Prize-nominated novel of the same name, a century-spanning exploration of authenticity and literary counterfeiture (“one of those rare books equal to its hype… a tour de force, a brilliant novel” – USA Today).
Quantum Theatre’s Chatterton spreads out in three dimensions, immersing its mobile audiences in the haunting spaces of Trinity Cathedral Pittsburgh. Its plot takes inspiration from the historical character Thomas Chatterton: the Romantic era’s most famous suicide, an 18th century poet who took his young life and was immortalized 100 years later by a very famous painting. Modeling for that painting was Victorian poet George Meredith, whose own dramatic life also features in Ackroyd’s novel. Meanwhile, in the present, poet Charles Wychwood goes on a hunt to solve mysterious puzzles from the past – is what we believe about Thomas Chatterton truth or fiction?
Chatterton offers a trifecta of poets in three centuries, a colorful London with Dickensian characters bristling with humor, and deep debates on what’s real and what’s fake in the intertwining worlds of art and commerce…
