SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER TIME - EDINBURGH FRINGE 2016

IT'S NEARLY EDINBURGH FRINGE O'CLOCK

It’s the 18^th July 2016. And we are in a rehearsal room at York Theatre Royal in our first day of rehearsal for SNAKES & GIANTS.

We’re back with our wonderful friends at Summerhall from the 3^rd – 27^th August. SNAKES & GIANTS is a show about landscape and building and losing and millions of years and fleeting moments. It’s exciting. It’s full of excellent sound and soul music. It’s full of movement and singing and dancing. And it’s uplifting. And it’s sad.

It’s 4 years since we were in exactly the same rehearsal room making BEULAH, a folk musical about William Blake. Similarly, a show which is about so much stuff and also about 2 people. And the feeling was the same – exciting and scary. The feeling of pushing at something and feeling like we’re breaking some new ground in what we make and how we make it. We’ve never played a whole lot with movement and dance before. And this is the first show we’ve ever made to be performed in a theatre space.

But that’s not all. We’re also up in Edinburgh with our excellent old friends at C Venues, where we first started working in 2007. We’re bringing back Dominic Allen’s brilliant show A COMMON MAN: THE BRIDGE THAT TOM BUILT. A story about the revolutionary, world changing man, Thomas Paine. We produced Dom’s show in 2013 and, as our world gets darker and harder, the show gets more and more relevant. It’s about refusing to accept the status quo, about inciting revolution, and about understanding things from history. And Dom is sheer, sheer joy to watch. He was last in The Crucible with Tom Morris at Bristol Old Vic, then he was in Aus with us and is currently out on tour with Les Enfant Terribles. 

In Australia at the beginning of this year we met a mathematician called Tom Smith. And he inspired a play. FROM THE MOUTHS OF THE GODS is about freewill and determinism and kissing. It’s performed by an actor and an audience member each day. So the pair in the story will never be the same twice. It’s a big experiment in storytelling and maths and, we hope, a month long journey of meeting excellent people we’d never have met otherwise.

So, these two weeks between now and opening these three shows will move fast. Probably too fast. But we can’t wait. Because a good summer in Edinburgh is one of the greatest joys.

And then we take the shows to more new friends at The Bikeshed.

And then we take the shows to great old friends at Greenwich Theatre.

And we couldn’t be happier!

See you on the way…

Holly, Hannah, Veronica, Dom, Joe, Joanne, Alex, Alex and Jim.