PRESS RELEASE June 2024 For immediate release
Existing characters, whether real or imagined, are a frequent jumping off point for original theatre.
PJV Studio have left Buxton with Fringe Awards in each of the last two years and return with Ariana vs Chomsky. A couple has tickets for the One Love concert, held for the victims of the 2017 Ariana Grande Manchester Arena bombing. Mixing drama and political interviews, the drama questions our role in the terrors that visit us. Clickers and Benders, who had a great success with Striking Feet last year, have set A Crimson Maple Leaf amongst the wounded Canadian WW1 soldiers recuperating in Buxton, telling the story of a young nurse who forms an attachment with an officer traumatised by what he has witnessed in France.
Plush Tiger Productions imagine a meeting of unlikely bedfellows in When Kurt Met Thora as Thora Hird (Hallelujah) encounters Kurt Cobain ahead of Nirvana's infamous appearance on TOTP in 1991. The pairs find unexpected similarities as well as religious differences. From an imagined meeting of real characters to a real character who was imagined, Tiptree: No-One Else's Damn Secret But My Own features James Tiptree Jr: CIA official, international traveller, and writer of science fiction, but all is not what it seems when Tiptree is 'outed' as Alice Sheldon, a 61-year-old woman from Virginia. A tour-de-force one-woman performance examines what happens when one’s secret is out.
Debbie Cannon, who was behind the wonderful Green Knight, presents The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton, in which Alice - widow, mother, and daughter of the late Lord Deputy of Ireland - begs the audience’s presence at a defence of her life, including her many miraculous deliverances from death, and a dreadful scandal.
Nuworks from Australia bring two intriguing pieces all the way from Australia. The Shoemaker of Havana is a new piece of epic theatre featuring: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kennedy, Khrushchev, the Shoemaker and his wife and more, while Treasure Island is a brand new musical adaptation of this time-honoured tale of pirates, treasure and treachery featuring the boy, Jim Hawkins (and girl, Beth), the treasure map and Long John Silver.
For those looking for something darker, there are new productions of work by Harold Pinter and HP Lovecraft at Buxton Community School’s Drama Studio. Derbyshire’s Ava Hunt Theatre presents Pinter’s A Slight Ache, in which everything appears to be perfect in Edward and Flora’s life, but the presence of a supposedly innocent match seller triggers a series of revelations, and their lives will never be the same again. Michael Sabbaton’s one-man adaptation of Lovecraft’s classic, The Temple, captivates with a chilling performance and mesmerising soundscape as it follows a cursed WWI U-boat encountering unimaginable horrors beneath the sea.
Fresh from award winning success in last year’s Liverpool Fringe, Keyhole Theatre Company deals with the experiences of Sean O'Brien in Liverpool during the famine in 1847. O’Brien’s Dream features a variety of characters and music was specially written by Frankie Connor of Radio Merseyside.
To find out more, Fringe-goers can pick up a programme, see www.buxtonfringe.org.uk or download the free Buxton Fringe App.
The Fringe wishes to thank High Peak Borough Council, its Fringe Friends and the town’s many Fringe supporters and venues.
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