Newcastle’s Alphabetti Theatre will present a new play written and performed by Gary Kitching and Steve Byron, Bacon Knees and Sausage Fingers, from 4 to 8 October.
Directed by Ali Pritchard, it tells the tale of a meeting between two social outsiders and originated at Alphabetti’s 2015 24 Hour Challenge, when Kitching and Byron wrote it in 24 hours, reacting to stimuli provided by Pritchard.
A dark comedy interspersed with Tarantino-inspired projections and images of dogs and set in the present day, it's a humorous comment on how society treats those who are different.
The story follows two social outsiders: a man who wraps bacon to his knees (Bacon Knees) and runs alongside dogs coaxing them into a race, and Sausage Fingers, an overweight ex-baker who's coming to terms with the death of his unsupportive father. This bizarre meeting happens on the High Level Bridge in Newcastle where this unlikely friendship blossoms as the two find their needs fulfilled by their friendship.
Bacon Knees and Sausage Fingers will form the basis of another Alphabetti event: The Response Plays. Forty local writers have been invited to watch a rehearsed reading of the piece and will then have nine days to submit a script.
They can respond to any aspect of the production they like—theme, story, characters, location, set—even the colour of the auditorium. The play doesn’t have to conform to any style or form of theatre, it just has to be one-act, for two actors, simple to stage and can be any length up to a maximum of 25 minutes.
Alphabetti’s Literary Department will choose the best scripts to be performed as part of a special theatre production, running every night from 12 to 15 October.
This will be the second in Alphabetti Response Plays series. In May of this year, the theatre presented two plays by Amy Mitchell (The Ties that Bind) and Arabella Arnott (Fresh Start) responding to Louise Taylor’s The Frights, first shown in March 2015.