Jabberwocky Market, a festival of pop-up theatre events, returns to Darlington for its 10th season from the end of March to the end of April. This season, there will be three venues, the Liddiard Theatre in Polam Hall School, the Friends’ Meeting House—and a railway train.
From 31 March to 28 April, Our Line by Hannah Bruce and Co is a story woven into the landscape that you travel through from Darlington to Bishop Auckland on the train. It’s a story about Nora—“I never met my great grandmother Nora, but she hovers around the edges of my mother’s memory. A tiny woman, she died when my mam was about 7. She remembers her baby teeth coming out at the time”—and it can be listened to by anyone with a smart device via a unique code on the TlotT app.
It runs on three trains a day on Thursdays and Saturdays and is free with a valid ticket for the journey. For full details, go to the Jabberwocky event page.
At the Quaker Meeting house from 12 to 14 April, dance company Turned on its Head presents a participatory show for under-5s, Sponge, in which children are invited to roll, squeeze and pop themselves through a new squashy kind of show, set to a 1970s-influenced score, in which two friendly dancers guide the participants, revealing small-scale and large-scale squishy, squashy environments, fascinating in shape, texture and touch—and the children might just be able to help Splegs who needs some assistance with walking.
The show runs for 45 minutes and the times are Thursday (10:30 and 1:30), Friday (10:30 and 1:30) and Saturday (10:00, 1:00 and 3:30).
On 27 April (7:30) and 28 (2:30), Victoria Melody and her father TV antique dealer Mike present Ugly Chief.
In 2013, Mike was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and given five years to live. Victoria was put in charge of planning the funeral (complete with eulogies, a New Orleans jazz procession and a congregation dressed in Blackpool FC tangerine), but a year later the doctors realised they had misdiagnosed Mike.
Victoria and Mike decided to go ahead with the funeral anyway and Victoria went to Port Talbot to train as a funeral director. Ugly Chief plays out two funerals—the one Victoria planned and the one her dad really wanted. And Mike is guest of honour at both. As the show unfolds, it unpicks the complicated relationship with a parent whose opinion you don’t always agree with.
And Mike will be running his own version of the Antiques Roadshow during the show. The audience are invited to bring along their heirlooms, curiosities and collectables for him to value during the show.