Brighton Festival highlights: on stage

Brighton Festival presents its strongest theatre programme to date

The presence of Vanessa Redgrave as guest director of this year’s festival has without doubt been a massive influence on the theatre programme, making it the strongest for many years with Festival commissions, and both world and UK premieres.

In a career now spanning six decades Vanessa Redgrave has worked in every field of the acting profession and is passionate about all those forms and as interested today in new work as she was when she first came to theatre and cinema in the 1960s.

She has already spoken about her excitement at seeing what must be the festival’s most anticipated new work The Rest Is Silence from innovative makers of site specific work dreamthinkspeak.

Billed as ‘A meditation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ this is an exciting new co-commission from Brighton Festival and a world premiere. In 2010 dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep broke records in an extended run at the old Brighton Co-op building in London Road. This year they are working in a large port-side warehouse space on Shoreham Harbour.

This thrillingly visual deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet interweaves performance and film to create a vigorous new interpretation of a well-known classic. Enclosed on all sides within a uniquely designed structure, we are drawn into a richly cinematic and dreamlike world. Scenes, film streams and visual sequences converge and collide, examining the play’s themes and characters simultaneously and from a variety of angles.
As we spy on the unfolding action, we become enmeshed in the messy duplicity of the characters’ tangled relationships, watching in horror at the unravelling of their private lives and the collapse of their world.
This will surely be the hottest ticket in town throughout the festival.
Wed 2 May–Fri 8 Jun.
Co-commissioned by Brighton Festival with LIFT and The Royal Shakespeare Company. The World Shakespeare Festival is produced by the The Royal Shakespeare Company for London 2012 Festival. Supported by Arts Council England.

Interiors
Vanishing Point

Behind a window, in a cosy room, a group of friends gather for a meal. The lamps are on, everyone is happy. Talk begins and stories unfold around the table. There is laughing, flirting and rather drunk dancing to rather bad pop music. But sadness soon threads its way through the occasion as secrets emerge and lies are exposed.

Interiors is a visually stunning and near wordless piece of theatre offering a funny, deeply moving and wonderfully detailed perspective on a party that we all recognise. As we, the audience, watch through the window, we glimpse the truths about our own lives that we’d all rather ignore.
Matthew Lenton is one of Scotland’s most acclaimed directors. His company, Vanishing Point, has performed all over the world and has worked with both the National Theatre Studio in England and National Theatre of Scotland. Interiors was commissioned for the Napoli Teatro Festival, Italy. It has received international acclaim and won numerous awards including Best Ensemble, Best Director and Best Production in Scotland’s Critic’s Awards.
Tue 8–Thu 10 May, 7:30pm
Theatre Royal Brighton
Tickets £10, £12.50, £15, £18.50
Festival Standby £10

Land’s End
Berlin
In their first ever visit to the UK, this celebrated Belgian theatre group created by Bart Baele Yves Degryse combines film, performance and mechanical installation to create a hybrid of reality and theatre.
Imagine a scenario: a murder, two suspects; each arrested in different countries with different judicial systems. For the trial to proceed they must meet but there’s no chance of extradition. Now imagine a solution: a farm is found on the border between the two countries, and a line is drawn. A chair is placed on either side. Now the meeting can begin…
Years after these strange – but true – arrangements, Berlin reconvenes the various participants in a mixture of live performance, filmed interviews and ingenious contraptions. As we enter the crime scene and the interrogation room and sift lies from facts, we too find ourselves in a curious hinterland between reality and fiction.
Land’s End is performed in Flemish and French with English surtitles.
Thu 10– Sun 13 May, 6.30pm and 9pm Old Municipal Market
Tickets £17.50, Festival Standby £10

Oedipussy
Spy Monkey
Hot on the heels of their gloriously anarchic Moby Dick comes the latest slice of Spymonkey lunacy: an outrageous no-holds barred subversion of the quintessential Greek tragedy. Take Spymonkey’s utterly infectious physical comedy. Combine with the playful storytelling of Kneehigh artistic director Emma Rice (The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter) and writing partner Carl Grose. Add a touch of Barbarella and little bit of Bond. The result? One ridiculous tale forbidden lust, accidental incest, violent murder and the ultimate dysfunctional family: a jealous father, messed-up son, and one mother of a comedy…
This greatest of tragic tales bounds to the stage with Spymonkey’s trademark theatrical invention. Contains incest, violence, mutilation, strobes, nudity and chorus-work!
Mon 14–Wed 16 May, 7:45pm
Theatre Royal Brighton
Tickets £10, £12.50, £15, £18.50
Festival Standby £10

What Can You Do?
Neil Bartlett

In a rare live performance, one of Britain’s most provocative theatre-makers revisits his formative works and unveils a new solo.
Writer, director, performer and raconteur Neil Bartlett has come a long way since the early 1980s, when he found notoriety with a series of performances confronting the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the UK.
In this special one-off event, he takes a personal and passionate look at nearly 30 years of solo performances to pieces first seen in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the ICA, the Drill Hall and the Royal Court.
With excerpts from A Vision Of Love Revealed In Sleep, Sarrasine and Night After Night, the evening concludes with the world premiere of What Can You Do? – specially commissioned by Brighton Festival.
Sat 26 May, 9:30pm
Theatre Royal Brighton, Tickets £5, £10, £15 Festival Standby £10

I Guess if the Stage Exploded
Sylvia Rimat
Is it possible to create a show never to be forgotten by its audience members?
Performance maker Sylvia Rimat would like to think so. By introducing memory tasks and techniques; by drawing on what happens in our brain when we create memories; and by exploiting our urge to be special and commemorated, she trains us to remember – hopefully forever. The show appears as part of East by South-East, who present three three of the finest new works developed in the east and south east regions.
Fri 18 May, 8.30pm, The Basement
Tickets £8 each, or 2 East by South East shows for £14

Motor Show
Requardt & Rosenberg
Take your seats for this wild, open-air performance in the wasteland of Black Rock. Watch as a car arrives, and inside a young couple kiss, fumble, argue, listen to music and plan a world for each other. Their whole lives stretch out before them and they are fireproof… and all the time the dark world turns around them. From afar the audience watch, wearing headphones to eavesdrop on the intimate interiors of cars approaching from the distance. Get caught in the headlights as a world of tinted windows and furtive dealings unfolds before you.
“Motor Show is a large-scale outdoor dance performance, wild and fragile spectacle – that contains scenes of adult content – set against a backdrop of sea and night sky. Welcome to the new world of Requardt & Rosenberg – the creators of Electric Hotel” – Brighton Festival 2010.
Wed 9–Sun 13 May, 9.45pm, Black Rock, Tickets £10

King Priam
Opera is given two modern, but massively contrasting outings in this year’s festival. First, a modern classic; Sir Michael Tippett’s King Priam, in which the eternal impulses and inherent futilities of war-making strike a contemporary chord in this 50th-anniversary concert performance of his second opera.

King Priam is confronted with an impossible decision – to kill his baby son or face his, and the city of Troy’s own destruction, as foretold in Hecuba’s dream. But with that decision the seeds are sown for a brutal tale of betrayal, vengeance and human suffering.

Based on Homer’s Iliad and first performed to coincide with the reconsecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962, King Priam explores personal and political struggles in making moral choices. The lean and angular soundworld mirrors the violent tensions of Homer’s text, both as intimate psychodrama and epic mythology.

‘King Priam, like Britten’s War Requiem, is a searing, unanswerable indictment of violence and militarism.’ – Gramophone
Sun 27 May, 7pm, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome
Tickets £10, £15, £20, £25, £30 Festival Standby £10

The second is presented by Hotel Pro Forma and titled War Sum Up and is a Brighton Festival Exclusive and UK Premiere. Billed as a multimedia manga music event on the nature of war, ghosts and superheroes, War Sum Up is an ultra-contemporary audio-visual spectacle that fuses classic warrior texts from Japanese Noh theatre with warmongering manga graphics, surreal costumes and a live music mash-up of contemporary choral music, electronica and melodious chamber pop.

Performed by the assembled ‘Warriors’ of the Latvian Radio Choir to an extraordinary soundworld created by British symphonic pop orchestra The Irrepressibles and Latvian composer Santa Ratniece, the libretto tells the story of three archetypes of war. First, the soldier, back from the front and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, the warrior, killed in battle and cast into Purgatory. Finally, the spy, captured in war but soon to be transformed…

As each character plays out their own story to a digital storm of striking manga graphics, the totality of war is revealed – from fantasy-fuelled power games to the here-and-now horrors of conflict on the ground.
War Sum Up is devised and created by Kirsten Dehlholm’s Danish performance pioneers Hotel Pro Forma in collaboration with an international team including: The Irrepressibles, composers Santa Ratniece and Gilbert Nouno, the Latvian Radio Choir, conductor Kaspars Putnins, fashion designer Henrik Vibskov and manga artist Hikaru Hayashi.
Fri 25 May, 8pm, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome
Tickets £15, £18.50, £22.50 Festival Standby £10

To book tickets – 01273 709709
www.brightonfestival.org