This autumn, Cornwall-based international touring company Kneehigh, with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, begins a new tour of Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs), its critically acclaimed radical reworking of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
It’s the first of three big productions at Manchester’s HOME venue during the autumn.
Dead Dog in a Suitcase is a morality tale for our times, delivered in the way only Kneehigh knows how.
The original Beggar’s Opera was written in 1728 by John Gay and was adapted by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1928 as The Threepenny Opera. Like its predecessors, Kneehigh’s new version is a musical satire that holds a mirror to contemporary society: confronting big business, corrupt institutions, and urban myths.
The production is suitable for ages 14+ and runs from September 11-26.
Following a critically acclaimed sold-out run last Christmas at the Young Vic in London and a West End transfer to Trafalgar Studios, theatre company 1927 brings Golem, its satirical take on our misuse of technology, to HOME from October 7-17.
Mixing live performance and music with film and animation, Golem follows the life of the extraordinarily ordinary Robert Robertson, whose life is irrevocably disrupted when he buys a golem: a creature who will improve the efficiency of his daily affairs. But when Robert upgrades to superior model Golem 2, the show questions what happens when man is no longer in control of machine.
Director Blanche McIntyre, winner of the TMA Best Director award in 2013 and the Critics’ Circle Most Promising Newcomer award in 2011, directs Ted Hughes’s adaptation of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’ epic drama about war, bloodshed, revenge, and justice, from October 23 to November 14.
First performed in 458BC, The Oresteia, the only surviving Ancient Greek trilogy in existence, comprises three of the most important plays of all time: Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides.
Ted Hughes’s version was performed for the first time at the National Theatre. HOME distils the original into a stripped-back 100 minutes.