IF, COURTESY of those Albert Square residents, you've already been immersed in vice this afternoon , perhaps the last thing you want to know is that there's an opportunity for more - in a different east London square. Hoxton Square, home to the Blue Note and the drum-and- bass scene, is the venue for a radical reinterpretation of The Seven Deadly Sins, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 1933 opera-ballet of vanity, ambition and success.
Organised by Random Collective and the Arthrob Foundation, "reinventors of the literary salon for the Nineties", to mark the centenary of Brecht's birth, the event will use a series of site-specific locations in and around the square to take its audience through the whole spectrum of Brecht's spiritual misadventure: a fitness centre for Gluttony, a boxing-ring for Wrath (see above), a strip-bar for Lust ... you get the idea. Bill Drummond, Iain Sinclair, Neil Bartlett and Hanif Kureishi will give reworkings of Brecht's words, while top DJs provide the sound. "This is an experiment," says Arthrob founder Ernesto Leal, whose cv includes introducing literary readings between tracks in nightclubs, and burning a million quid with the K Foundation. He sees dramatic adaptation and DJ-ing as parallel creative processes: "adaptation is a form of sampling, with new writers using the existing text as material'.
Always one for forging new relationships between audience and stage, Brecht surely would not have disapproved of this latest experiment in communication. (The three-hour tour starts at 3pm today at Hoxton Hall, Hoxton St, EC2. Tickets pounds 7.50/pounds 5, booked on 0171 372 1241.)
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