The set design of Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind looked clinical and was full of disparate objects: screens, a wind machine, table and chairs, and a thundersheet from which a ramp sloped downwards at an awkward gradient. I immediately drew a blank: how would these things come together coherently? The smooth hessian or […]

At first Franko B’s new work Because of Love – Volume 1 appears as resolutely non-theatrical as his previous offerings. Incorporating an uncompromisingly opaque mise-en-scene and sections of unblinking repetition that lead nowhere, it very politely puts both fingers up at the proscenium arch that surrounds it. Yet it also weaves a story through our subconscious through […]

A weekend at ‘the nation’s capital of seaside entertainment’ by Lisa Wolfe (writer) and Peter Chrisp (photographer/researcher) Friday 15 February 2013 Vic Godard and the Subway Sect’s lyrics accompany our journey North from one slightly seedy beach-front tourist destination (Brighton) to this one: “Good old fun-packed Blackpool by the sea. Flat-capped sex trap Blackpool. One […]

Showing as a revival alongside Two Cigarettes In the Dark, Vollmond, meaning full moon, was first performed in 2006. The company of twelve dancers offered a chair for the audience’s ‘ghost to have seat too’, embodying our alter-ego on stage. They filled a bleak, barren, landscape with a series of sketches drawing on social relationships and behaviour […]

Two Cigarettes in the Dark opens on a stage that is anything but dark. Instead a brilliant white high-walled ballroom occupies the space, framed on three sides by room-sized glass-fronted vivariums – verdant tropical foliage in one, a mini desert and cactus in another, and a giant fish tank in the third. These decidedly artificial landscapes […]