A venue group has turned a grade II-listed former shop into a fully equipped theatre which will host 127 performances at Buxton Fringe.
Underground Venues will be taking part in its 19th Fringe season in the Derbyshire spa town and will host shows every day during the festival, which will last almost three weeks.
Black Liver will present its new musical play Devilled Eggs in which Roman and Prudence, hosts of the Dakota guest house, regale you with “stories of notoriety, comedy and tragedy”. Every room in the Dakota is “a character with a tale to tell”. It will be performed on Tuesday 16 July at 1PM and Wednesday and Thursday, 17 and 18 July, at 8:30PM.
Worklight Theatre will preview Joe Sellman-Leava and Dylan Howells’s It’s the Economy, Stupid! which calculates how their lives were shaped by the economies they grew up in. It will take to the Underground at Spring Gardens stage on Wednesday 17 July at 4PM, Thursday 18 July at 7PM and Friday 19 July at 2:30PM.
Dundee-based Sweet Productions will take three shows to Buxton. The company will team up with Burns Unit for Gruoch: The Lady Macbeth, a “feminist, myth-centred, lyrical origin tale of Gruoch, the real-life inspiration behind Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth”. Caroline Burns Cooke will perform the tale that runs from Lady Macbeth’s childhood to her final, fateful moments stalking through the castle halls on Monday 8 July at 8:30PM, Tuesday 9 July at 7PM and Wednesday 10 July at 4PM.
Sweet Productions and Theatre Nation will present a one-man show, Patrick Kealey in The Life and Rhymes of Archy and Mehitabel. Archy, who is trapped in the body of a cockroach, “reflects on the insanity and inanity of humanity as he records his memoirs on a newly discovered typewriter”. Performances will be on Monday 8 July at 4PM, Tuesday, 9 July at 8:30PM and Wednesday 10 July at 1PM.
Sweet Productions and Brite Theater will stage a one-person show of Shakespeare’s Richard III on Wednesday 17 July at 7PM and Thursday and Friday, 18 and 19 July, at 1PM.
New writing Underground at Spring Gardens includes Barbara Diesel and Helen Parry’s Dear Eliza, a “defiant exploration of a friendship strained by mental illness” (Friday 5 July at 5:30PM, Tuesday 9 July at 2:30PM and Tuesday 16 July at 4PM) and Sessions by Working Progress Collective which involves a troublesome youth who has narrowly avoided prison for a violent offence being placed with an unconventional youth officer (Tuesday 9 July at 1PM and Wednesday until Friday, 10 to 12 July, at 2:30PM.
Further details are available at the Underground Venues web site.