Five new pieces of theatre are coming to ARC Stockton between 24 May and 20 June.
First on 24 May at 7:00 is Nuketown, developed at ARC by writer and performer Jack Dean. In it he asks, “what would you do with £205 billion?” That’s the serious question he asks in a piece which combines storytelling and protest art to create a play about cities, public money—and the possible end of life as we know it.
He’s built a new, modern, utopian city which is equal in value to the Trident replacement programme. He has worked with town planners, architects and enormous amounts of Lego. Now he is inviting audiences to help him finish off the city and hear an epic tale that animates this imaginary landscape. This is one man’s epic quest to find love, a lost cat and a solution to the military-industrial complex.
A couple of weeks later, on 6 June, Francesca Beard shows us How to Survive a Post-Truth Apocalypse, an epic adventure through a wonderland of lies, fictions, Wikipedia facts and the stories that we tell ourselves. In a post-truth world that's had enough of experts, but not enough of Donald Trump, she asks, “what is the global cost of make-believe? Are all humans liars? Can the truth set us free?”
The following week, on 14 June, Chris Thorpe and Portuguese company ask for Your Best Guess. We make plans for the future, assuming that things will turn out as expected. But they may not; life is entirely unpredictable. What if we could rewrite history? What if we could anticipate all roads to the future, so that we could be prepared for any possible scenario?
On 19 June, the focus moves to Stockton High Street where between 12:00 and 6:30 Ellie Harrison takes A Journey with Absent Friends as she brings The Grief Series to Teesside.
Where do our memories of the dead live? In sacred spaces like gravestones, or aisle 22 of Tesco? On someone’s Facebook page or Twitter feed? Ellie Harrison is on a month-long journey to find out. Travelling between sites of personal remembrance, Ellie will be stopping at arts centres, museums, beer gardens and maybe even the occasional service station. You are invited to embark on your own journey to spend some time reflecting. Add your memories to her audio archive or embroidered map, have a cuppa and spend some time exploring a caravan full of hidden treasures. The caravan is free and open to people of all ages.
Finally, on 19 June (7:00) and 20 June (2:30 and 7:00), ARC's Artistic Associate Umar Butt presents Alex and Eliza.
As a girl, she lived through the death and destruction of the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan, but now Zubair’s grandmother is like everyone else’s grandmother: old and wrinkly, slow in speech and speed. The separation, isolation and loss of that time are a distant memory. Now she makes her own olive oil, mango pickle and butter. She sits in the afternoon sun brushing her grandchildren's hair; she knits sweaters for the winter and makes cakes. She has lived in the same house on the same street for 40 years and then she gets on a plane to visit Zubair in another country…
All these events are Pay What You Decide except for A Journey with Absent Friends, which is free.