Full marks to Manchester International Festival for discovering the Mayfield Depot and arranging for it to be used as a venue during the festival. It’s a huge cavernous space with big sliding doors and big rooms off the central hall. At the far end is a blocked off room which the stewards ask you to […]

Beta Public was a two-pronged thrust at exposing the underbelly of what computer games could mean in the world of theatre. The evening began below stairs with a loosely curated exhibition of video games on various devices, with creators hovering by, and culminated in a short programme of demonstrations and discourse on what gaming could […]

Johnno McCreadie is 15 and lives in Livingston, Scotland. His friend Spanner is a bit of a bad laddie; his mum Alison is worried about those boys, about drugs. The D-man, a techno-head from the south of England, is taking Johnno and Spanner to a rave, Johnno’s first ever. Robert Dunlop is a policeman haunted […]

Sitting in the lotus position on a mat of taped-together tennis towels, Jamie Wood meditated as the audience idled in. Every now and then he opened one eye to spot someone in the audience, picked up one of the tennis balls encircling him, pointed at the person, and threw it at them. Usually they caught […]

97 Years by Jo Hellier is an interactive installation, facilitated by the artist, in which the audience are given strings that control a delicately balanced soundscape featuring Jo’s granddad talking about his garden and his wife Marian. The composition of sound, film and performance has a light touch yet enormous emotional weight, evoking tears and […]