Desperate Men Theatre Company is a street theatre company founded by Richie Smith and Jon Beedell in 1980, and is the UK's longest-running street theatre company. Now based in Bristol, England, the company aims to produce original, accessible comic theatre, and offers a variety of street animations, bespoke work, and creative consultancy.
In 1985, Smith and Beedell appeared in Vivian Stanshall and Ki Longfellow-Stanshall's Old Profanity Showboat production of Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera. Smith played the part of Buster and Beedell played Screwy. Richard Smith reprised his role in the 1988 London production at the Bloomsbury Theatre.
Desperate Men have a history of producing work that deals with social and environmental issues, such as littering – the Rubbish Heads, recycling – Eco-Pirates and the forthcoming bicentary of Charles Darwin's birth – Darwin and the Dodo. In 2007 they were artistic leaders on the Severn Project, one of the UK's largest outdoor arts projects.
Desperate Men have also worked internationally, including recently in Beirut and later this year in Hong Kong. They are also working to develop a project as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in the South-West of England.
The name 'Desperate Men' comes from a poem by John Donne – 'Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men...'
Famous quotes containing the words desperate, men, theatre and/or company:
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923)
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)