My Name is Sue, part of the line-up at this year's PULSE
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May holds a wealth of delights for theatregoers across the UK.
There are festivals in both Brighton and Bristol, both intriguingly and eclectically programmed.
Then there’s Ipswich’s PULSE 2010 - the line up for which has just been announced - which though in some ways smaller, must rank as the most interesting of the lot.
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The festival will run from the 27 May – 12 June and see, as the name implies, theatre pulsing through the city, with productions staged in conventional venues – including the New Wolsey Theatre – as well as at more unusual sites across Ipswich.
Site-specific work will feature prominently at the festival and there will be productions in cafes, car parks and hotels. Leo Kay will be performing It’s Like He’s Knocking in a bedsit, while Metis Arts’ new piece, 3rd Ring Out, will take place in an industrial container. There will be Shakespeare performances in restaurants and immersive sculpture in the shopping centre.
The festival’s opening weekend will feature work from the Escalator programme, a scheme that supports the creative process of artists and theatre-makers. Highlights include The Siege, a rehearsed reading by the nabokov theatre company of a new work by playwright (When You Cure Me; Fanny and Faggot) and Skins scribe Jack Thorne as well as a piece by Paines Plough, Come To Where I’m From, that showcases the work of local writers.
PULSE 2010 also offers the chance to catch some of the hit shows from the 2009 Edinburgh Festival, most notably the chance to participate in Ontroerend Goed’s Internal, an intimate, personal piece for an audience of five that was the talking point of the Fringe. It’s the kind of divisive, limit-pushing theatre that awed some but left other cold and while it’s not quite as potent as the company’s earlier piece, Smile Off Your Face, it’s definitely worth experiencing.
Other productions worth catching include You Need Me’s Certain Dark Things, an atmospheric ensemble piece based in Spain in the 1950; Daffyd Jones and Ben Lewis’s agreeably batty musical piece, My Name is Sue, and Kirstin Fredricksson’s moving piece about her father, Everything Must Go.
PULSE 2010 runs from 27 May - 12 June 2010. For more information visit: PulseFringe.com.
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