Stage: Role Models & Lotharios
A fictional pop star, a legendary libertine, plenty of poets and a terrorist attack – coming to a theatre near you
Challenging the lopsided limits of gender roles, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model (Dome Studio Theatre, Thurs 3 July) sees Bryony Kimmings and her 11-year-old niece Taylor attempt to strike back against
the media and music industry’s sexualisation of childhood.
Combining a social experiment with humorous theatre, the award-winning artist has created a fictional celebrity in order to take on the ‘global tween machine’ at its own game. Enter Catherine Bennett, a dinosaur-loving, bike-riding, tuna pasta-eating, alternative pop star.
Kimmings, who previously gave us Sex Idiot and 7 Day Drunk, has taken the idea beyond the show’s scope into an ongoing character with a real team of make-up artists, stylists and PR people. A strange case of art imitating life and then becoming life. It’s fascinating to see how far it can go.
Some plays suffer when a classic story is forced into a modern setting, but the updating of Don Juan In Soho (Brighton Little Theatre, 24-28 June) seems wholly apt for the subject matter.
Molière scored a double whammy when he managed to offend both the church and monarchy with his 1660 retelling of the life of the legendary libertine, Don Juan. The play was a costly failure in its day, but it has since been turned into something of a subversive success by Patrick Marber – a man you may remember from his comic appearances in early Alan Partridge vehicles.
Having transposed the story onto a contemporary backdrop, complete with a cod-classical techno soundtrack, Marber’s black comedy follows “a priapic lothario cutting a swathe through modern Soho”. Leigh Ward directs as Christy Pearce plays the anti-hero DJ.
The Fifth Annual Sussex Poetry Festival (Marlborough Theatre, 13-14 June) takes place this week, bringing with it a diverse range of voices, including headliners Will Rowe, Alli Warren, Allen Fisher, Ulf Stolterfoht and J.H. Prynne.
Eschewing performance poetry slam stuff in favour of formal experimentation, the festival aims to encourage interaction and debate through verse, as well as expressing a broad sense of political dissent. With 17 poets over two days, you’ll be lucky to get a word in.
Decade (New Venture Theatre, 18-26 July) is a compilation of short theatre pieces about the fateful day in 2001 when the Twin Towers came down. Twenty playlets, all by different writers, each address different aspects of the tragedy and its legacy. Together they form an ‘imaginative investigation’ into the differing responses to what will surely be one of the century’s defining events.
In an interesting linking device, the evening involves moving from one theatre space to another.
Directed by Kirsty Elmer, the show essentially poses the question: what can we learn about 9/11 a decade after the event?
