Theatreship Presents: Black Narcissus + Karl Lutchmayer

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Theatreship presents Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger, part of a BFI major UK-wide celebration of one of the greatest and most enduring filmmaking partnerships: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.    Over six events, we celebrate their bold, subversive and iconoclastic films, pairing each with contemporary and complementary performance.

Black Narcissus

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar

UK 1947.  100 mins

Rating: PG

A group of nuns open a makeshift convent in the foothills of the Himalayas, but soon find their vows challenged in this new, exotic environment. Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh has a spiritual crisis, while a fellow nun, brilliantly played by Kathleen Byron, becomes erotically obsessed with a British agent, leading to an unforgettable ending.

Kerr gives one of her best performances as the troubled nun, although it is Byron’s portrayal of the delirious Sister Ruth, particularly in the famous lipstick scene, that lingers most. Jack Cardiff’s beautiful cinematography and Alfred Junge’s sets both won Oscars.

Released a few months before Indian independence, the story exists in a cultural context of the breakdown of the British colonial project in India. Critic Dave Kehr describes the film in this context as depicting a "rational retreat from something that England never owned nor understood".

Karl Lutchmayer is a highly acclaimed concert pianist of Goan Indian heritage. He is currently working on a new national music curriculum for India to allow traditional Indian music to be taught alongside the Western Classical canon. For this work he was awarded the Bharat Gaurav (Pride of India) Lifetime Achievement award in 2015 and the Indians of the World Medal in June 2022.

As a response to the film, Karl Lutchmayer will be performing a selection of pieces from his upcoming concert series of classical piano arrangements of Bollywood film music, painting a musical picture of a cultural synthesis where the nuns of Black Narcissus so dramatically failed.

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