Meow Meow, James Saito, Ravi Shankar, et al. Set for Edinburgh International Festival

Programming for the Edinburgh International Festival, which will be held August 12-September 4, has been announced.

EIF will stage the world premiere of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage and a dramatic revelation of long buried World War II secrets, based on a novel by Haruki Murakami, and adapted for the stage by Greg Pierce and Stephen Earnhart.

The cast for the production will include James Yaegashi, Stacey Yen, James Saito, Maureen Sebastian, Toshiji Takeshima, Mina Nishimura, Akira Takayama, Akira Ito and Yoshihiro Watanabe. The show has set and puppet design by Tom Lee, with projections by Adam Larsen, sound by Jane Shaw, and costumes by Oana Botez-Ban.

In addition, the Mokwha Repertory Company will stage a re-imagined production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to be adapted and directed by Tae-Suk Oh; Taipei’s Contemporary Legend Theatre will present a one-man version of King Lear, written, directed and performed by Wu Hsing-Kuo; and Tim Supple’s One Thousand and One Nights, a six-hour exploration of the “never-ending stories” of Lebanese novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh, will receive its European premiere.

Other programming will include the new musical Glasgow Girls; a new work-in-progress by British cabaret and theater star Meow Meow; a performance by legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar; The Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe’s production of The Revenge of Prince Zi Da; choreographer Shen Wei’s “Re-Triptych; and The Mariinsky Opera of St Petersburg’s production of Richard Strauss’s Woman Without a Shadow.

For more information, visit www.eif.co.uk