Departure Lounge, a summer festival of “fresh and thrilling theatre with a bumper line-up of shows”, is to be staged for the seventh year at Derby Theatre.
The three-day festival will feature Edinburgh previews, works-in-progress, workshops and talks as well as “contemporary, cutting-edge and innovative performance”.
On Friday 19 July, there will be a panel discussion on The Arts: A Shifting Landscape. Chair will be British theatre critic, writer and journalist Lyn Gardner. The panel will include Derby Theatre’s chief executive and artistic director Sarah Brigham, Tarek Iskander, artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre, and Charlotte Bennett, joint artistic director of Paines Plough.
Departure Lounge highlights include the return of Olivier Award nominee Caroline Horton with the première of All of Me, “a funny, hopeful and unapologetic piece, the show that happens after the curtain call when the lights have gone down but the mess remains”.
Festival favourite Not Too Tame will present its new show See How They Run, a “helter-skelter piece of gig theatre which takes the audience on a magical mystery ride, a unique and raucous show inspired by the music of The Beatles”.
Ad Infinitum will stage Extraordinary Wall of Silence, a work-in-progress show which combines the company’s signature style of physical storytelling with British Sign Language.
Zoo Indigo’s work-in-progress Britizenship is a “multimedia cabaret of national anthems and popular music in Irish, English, Yiddish and German” performed through the medium of drag.
The festival also includes Plea Bargain by Jake Bowen, a one-to-one performance based on Jake’s experience of the criminal justice system. Audience members take the role of a solicitor and, with limited time, must find the facts and pass judgement.
Departure Lounge runs from Thursday 18 until Saturday 20 July. The full programme is available at the Derby Theatre web site.