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Looking Forward to LatitudeCorinne Salisbury previews theatre at next week's Latitude FestivalDateline: 9th July, 2010Well, we're out of the World Cup; Wimbledon is over for the year and not much progress made; what's left but art? That's what my mind's saying anyway. It's with high anticipation therefore - and strong hope for sunshine - that we look forward to Latitude Festival 2010, which starts next Thursday 15th July and runs until Sunday 18th. The range, quality and quantity of the theatre work at the festival has been increasing steadily year on year, until in 2010 we seem surely to be reaching some sort of critical mass. What's more, it seems that with each passing year the identity of the festival grows stronger, so that the theatre shows respond more and more to Latitude's highly specific demands and rewards. This year sees a record amount of "bespoke productions": shows created specifically to respond to and capitalise on the atmosphere of the festival, and a number of shows responding to the actual physical site as well. There's music galore, of course. The Royal Opera House will bring some grand drama to the forest, with outdoor performances of their new commission, an irreverent biopic of the 18th-century satirist William Hogarth. The Opera Group and London Sinfonietta are doing their acclaimed two-woman opera Into The Little Hill, a retelling of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, in a co-production with Aldeburgh Music and ROH2. In the new writing camp there's plenty of musical collaborations too, and these could prove some of the most interesting shows of the festival. The Lyric Hammersmith are working with experimental music collective The London Snorkelling Team to present The Island, a multimedia performance which combines short animations, music and live action. English Touring Theatre will bring us Lovesong, a play for one man and a piano, written and directed by Che Walker and performed by Omar, the British soul singer who also starred in Walker's Been So Long last year. And I personally can't wait for innovative theatre company nabokov's new show It's About Time, co-written by playwright Joel Horwood and composer Arthur Darvill: a "play with songs", essentially, telling the story of old mates trying to reform their old band and to rekindle the friendship of their youth. Strangely, Cartoon de Salvo's new satirical show Pub Rock is on a similar theme, but inverted: a well-established band have enjoyed huge commercial success but now are tempted to throw it all away. Other musical highlights should include Les Enfants Terribles' new show The Vaudevillains - a sort of anarchic murder mystery cabaret, with a murder providing the narrative framework in which a series of vaudeville acts desperately perform. Meanwhile Irish band Duke Special will be playing three concept albums in the forest, one of them being the music that they wrote specifically for the National's recent production of Mother Courage and her Children. And Birmingham Rep present The Decypher Collective's 8SIXTEEN32, a show that combines theatre, hip hop and spoken word. Some of the bespoke productions are all about the edginess and the mystery. The Royal Shakespeare Company, after their brilliantly site-responsive festival shows of the past two years, return with a new play by Carl Grose, about which we know almost nothing. As though taking their cue from the marketers of the Lyric's Ghost Stories, all the company will say is that their late-night performances will be "chaotic, engaging, entertaining, and dangerous", and will feature "a pig in a dress". There's intriguing talk of flashmobs too. Less edgily, but equally good, the RSC are also running a series of practical theatre workshops for festival-goers throughout. Another piece which promises to be dark and dangerous is Mark Ravenhill's The Experiment, presented by Soho Theatre: performed by the playwright himself, it was in last year's Terror season at the Southwark Playhouse. And Theatre 503 are bringing a new play to the festival called The Epic: about which, again, they'll reveal almost nothing, expect to say that "it's going to be something you wouldn't expect to see". Theatre 503 will also be part of the vibrant programme of shorts being performed on the outdoor stage in the woods. They will be showing a new PlayLIST: their regular new writing night where writers are invited to write theatrical responses to pieces of music, making sure that the plays are no longer than the songs that have inspired them. The Factory will also be running around the woods performing a series of short plays, as part of their Round Two project which emphasises spontaneity in performance, and invites the audience to choose and cast the plays for maximum unpredictability. And Eyebrow Productions will bring us In An Instant, a series of specially commissioned short plays by writers including Jack Thorne, James Graham and Matthew Dunster, with more musical collaboration, this time from Dave Tither. In terms of the more out-there shows - those that revel in their own theatricality and the possibilities of theatre - I'm intrigued by HighTide's new piece, The Theatre EP, which is described as "three short boutique musicals", and seems to involve one on one audio experiences in outdoor spaces. And I'm much looking forward to Sean Holmes' new show with Filter, in a co-production with the Lyric Hammersmith; after their deliriously joyful and irreverent Twelfth Night, Filter are now doing a condensed A Midsummer Night's Dream, which they will perform both indoors and out. Unusually, it's not the only Shakespeare at the festival: East Anglia's Mouth to Mouth will perform The Comedy of Errors outdoors, in what could prove to be a gloriously silly production of a very silly play. Another comic romp comes from Bad Physics, who will perform their new show Pitching In, an "in-tents soap opera for the stage" set, funnily enough, at a music festival in Suffolk. And the Bush will be back with another scatterbrained, populist, audience-participation-heavy show - a format they've nailed in the last couple of years with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and Sudden Loss of Dignity. This year it's The Great British Country Fete: written by Russell Kane and featuring music by Michael Bruce, it sounds like it could be a bit of an immersive experience, and promises to fondly lambast the stereotypes and rituals associated with the country fete. On a similar theme will be Paines Plough's piece Tiny Volcanoes, a new commission from Laurence Wilson. It will deal with notions of patriotism and Britishness, in the format of a funny, whirlwind, multimedia tour of modern Britain. As a single-authored play it's somewhat in the minority at the festival this year. Even rarer are the straight "serious" plays. But perhaps they'll be the more appreciated for it: Northern Stage and Company of Angels co-production Apples is adapted by John Retallack from the novel by Richard Milward and promises a searing examination of destructive adolescence; while Shatterbox Theatre Company's Fair Trade, supported by Emma Thompson, is a sprawling investigation of the international sex trade. Then going back into the arena of everything-but-straight-drama - and it's a big camp this year - Tangled Feet will present their new experimental physical show Undercover, based around ideas of bedtime. Not that I'll be seeing mine very much for four days - bed, that is. The breadth and brilliance of this year's programme seems designed to test the devotion of the theatre audience, who form an increasingly strong portion of Latitude devotees. How many shows can we possibly hope to cram in? Let the challenge begin. Corinne Salisbury >> The index of our full coverage of Latitude 2010
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