Dancing, dinosaurs and a Douglas Adams-style dystopia featured in this year's dramatic line-up – and Daniel Kitson was everywhere
Theatre maker Caroline Horton is speaking through a headset in the woods, Forest Fringe have turned a woman into an elephant and are chasing her with video cameras, and somewhere a queue for Daniel Kitson is inevitably, inexorably forming.
Theatre is everywhere this year at Latitude festival. From the stifling Theatre Arena to the root-strewn outdoor auditorium, performances erupt from ice cream vans or mysterious woodland booths, and spill into unexpected happenings and chance encounters across the site.
*Praxis Makes Perfect*, electro-pop group Neon Neon's collaboration with National Theatre Wales, may not be the best show of the weekend, but its brazen freestyling between traditional theatre, danceable gig and immersive experience is a microcosm of the festival. A full-cast staging of Neon Neon's latest album – a dusky biography of communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – is the catchiest manifesto for the power of free speech you're likely to find. And definitely the only one with Soviet leopards.
But it will never eclipse comedian and performer *Daniel Kitson*, who is omnipresent, with three separate shows and the premiere of his first concert film. The biggest show is his current touring play, After the Beginning, Before the End, a deft but dense rumination on the creation and fluctuation of identity and self-perception. It's as achingly funny and quietly revelatory as you'd expect, and feels like a companion piece to last year's "As of 1.52pm...", with the focus shifted from the explicitly artistic to the personal. At any rate, it's some distance from the rhyming adventuring of Lucinda Ding and the Monstrous Thing. Kitson's one-off performance with guitar-wielding collaborator Gavin Osborn is a small but perfectly formed gift to its audience. There is also a work in progress (called, yes, Work in Progress) toward his upcoming Royal Exchange show in Manchester: something about gangs, non-conformity and a spate of neighbourhood tree-cutting. Kitson seems almost giddy about it, and after this weekend's performances, who could doubt him?
Despite Kitson's undimmed prowess, for me his crown was snatched away by another one-man show, Ben Moor's fantasy *Each of Us*. Set in a world a stone's throw from our own, it charts the failed romance of a man employed to "ratchet down" his company's efficiency, in an alternate reality of ingenious comic inversions. Moor describes a world where offices run secret-Satan schemes to distribute random misery, and terrorism has been replaced with "inconvenience-ism", which it turns out is just as terrible. It is a moving satire on the arbitrariness of the everyday, rivaling the best of Douglas Adams in its witty conjugation of cultural norms and ephemera.
An unexpected highlight of Latitude 2013 is Alice Birch's *Little on the Inside*, a play that hisses like sulphuric acid. Two nameless women prisoners have formed an unlikely friendship: one kicks and spits against the system, the other simply retreats into an oasis she has carved out. Both are trapped, but one has the power to create an oasis in her mind, a patch of green in a world of concrete. Simone James holds nothing back in a viciously raw performance, and Birch's script never allows the grim complexity of reality to be effaced by her furious lyricism. A similar blindside comes from *The Frenzy* by Rash Dash, one of several top-quality contributions from Lyric Hammersmith. The Bacchae by way of a kick in the bollocks, three women wearing funereal weeds strip them off to reveal a riot of liberated fury in three-part folk harmony. They fling themselves to the ground in ecstasy and raise goblet after goblet of wine, the modernity of their music and dance collapsing the divide between ancient and modern bacchanals. It leaves the air of the Faraway Forest ringing.
There's another kind of righteous frenzy in performance artist Bryony Kimmings' show over at the Cabaret tent; even if, for once, Kimmings's material is strictly child-friendly (her previous pieces include her one-woman show, 7 Day Drunk, and the distinctly x-rated Sex Idiot). Kimmings' new project, for which she collaborated on a character with her nine-year-old niece, has produced Catherine Bennett – an ass-kicking palaeontologist superstar. If it doesn't make you want to dance with joy then you're objectively a bad person. There's more about dancing and less about dinosaur bones than there could be, but *Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model* should be a killer prospect by the time it reaches the Edinburgh fringe.
Perhaps inevitably, the line-up comes with disappointments, too: Chris Thorpe's *There Has Possibly Been an Incident* is slightly stilted and its thesis insufficiently developed, Made in China's Gym Party has an intriguing opening but defaults into the same territory as Ontroerend Goed's infamous Audience, where the crowd's capacity for complicity in apparent acts of violence or cruelty was put to the test. Here there is no real sense of danger, though the piece is still in development and there is potential in its critique of talent shows and empty success-seeking.
Latitude also comes with occasional mismatches of work and setting, and more than a few half-baked concepts roam the forest like escapees from an A-level drama devising session. Shows are often compromised – whether it's Bloc Party booming on a nearby stage or the comings and goings of itinerant audience members – but the festival favours an approachability and accessibility that theatre rarely enjoys. Audiences flit between big names and emerging companies, between immersive LSD simulators in a marquee to multimedia mega-shows without batting an eye or adjusting their expectations. Of course, there's a hefty price tag attached, but once you're through the gates, Latitude makes the dream of theatre for all into a brief, sun-scorched reality. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
Theatre maker Caroline Horton is speaking through a headset in the woods, Forest Fringe have turned a woman into an elephant and are chasing her with video cameras, and somewhere a queue for Daniel Kitson is inevitably, inexorably forming.
Theatre is everywhere this year at Latitude festival. From the stifling Theatre Arena to the root-strewn outdoor auditorium, performances erupt from ice cream vans or mysterious woodland booths, and spill into unexpected happenings and chance encounters across the site.
*Praxis Makes Perfect*, electro-pop group Neon Neon's collaboration with National Theatre Wales, may not be the best show of the weekend, but its brazen freestyling between traditional theatre, danceable gig and immersive experience is a microcosm of the festival. A full-cast staging of Neon Neon's latest album – a dusky biography of communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – is the catchiest manifesto for the power of free speech you're likely to find. And definitely the only one with Soviet leopards.
But it will never eclipse comedian and performer *Daniel Kitson*, who is omnipresent, with three separate shows and the premiere of his first concert film. The biggest show is his current touring play, After the Beginning, Before the End, a deft but dense rumination on the creation and fluctuation of identity and self-perception. It's as achingly funny and quietly revelatory as you'd expect, and feels like a companion piece to last year's "As of 1.52pm...", with the focus shifted from the explicitly artistic to the personal. At any rate, it's some distance from the rhyming adventuring of Lucinda Ding and the Monstrous Thing. Kitson's one-off performance with guitar-wielding collaborator Gavin Osborn is a small but perfectly formed gift to its audience. There is also a work in progress (called, yes, Work in Progress) toward his upcoming Royal Exchange show in Manchester: something about gangs, non-conformity and a spate of neighbourhood tree-cutting. Kitson seems almost giddy about it, and after this weekend's performances, who could doubt him?
Despite Kitson's undimmed prowess, for me his crown was snatched away by another one-man show, Ben Moor's fantasy *Each of Us*. Set in a world a stone's throw from our own, it charts the failed romance of a man employed to "ratchet down" his company's efficiency, in an alternate reality of ingenious comic inversions. Moor describes a world where offices run secret-Satan schemes to distribute random misery, and terrorism has been replaced with "inconvenience-ism", which it turns out is just as terrible. It is a moving satire on the arbitrariness of the everyday, rivaling the best of Douglas Adams in its witty conjugation of cultural norms and ephemera.
An unexpected highlight of Latitude 2013 is Alice Birch's *Little on the Inside*, a play that hisses like sulphuric acid. Two nameless women prisoners have formed an unlikely friendship: one kicks and spits against the system, the other simply retreats into an oasis she has carved out. Both are trapped, but one has the power to create an oasis in her mind, a patch of green in a world of concrete. Simone James holds nothing back in a viciously raw performance, and Birch's script never allows the grim complexity of reality to be effaced by her furious lyricism. A similar blindside comes from *The Frenzy* by Rash Dash, one of several top-quality contributions from Lyric Hammersmith. The Bacchae by way of a kick in the bollocks, three women wearing funereal weeds strip them off to reveal a riot of liberated fury in three-part folk harmony. They fling themselves to the ground in ecstasy and raise goblet after goblet of wine, the modernity of their music and dance collapsing the divide between ancient and modern bacchanals. It leaves the air of the Faraway Forest ringing.
There's another kind of righteous frenzy in performance artist Bryony Kimmings' show over at the Cabaret tent; even if, for once, Kimmings's material is strictly child-friendly (her previous pieces include her one-woman show, 7 Day Drunk, and the distinctly x-rated Sex Idiot). Kimmings' new project, for which she collaborated on a character with her nine-year-old niece, has produced Catherine Bennett – an ass-kicking palaeontologist superstar. If it doesn't make you want to dance with joy then you're objectively a bad person. There's more about dancing and less about dinosaur bones than there could be, but *Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model* should be a killer prospect by the time it reaches the Edinburgh fringe.
Perhaps inevitably, the line-up comes with disappointments, too: Chris Thorpe's *There Has Possibly Been an Incident* is slightly stilted and its thesis insufficiently developed, Made in China's Gym Party has an intriguing opening but defaults into the same territory as Ontroerend Goed's infamous Audience, where the crowd's capacity for complicity in apparent acts of violence or cruelty was put to the test. Here there is no real sense of danger, though the piece is still in development and there is potential in its critique of talent shows and empty success-seeking.
Latitude also comes with occasional mismatches of work and setting, and more than a few half-baked concepts roam the forest like escapees from an A-level drama devising session. Shows are often compromised – whether it's Bloc Party booming on a nearby stage or the comings and goings of itinerant audience members – but the festival favours an approachability and accessibility that theatre rarely enjoys. Audiences flit between big names and emerging companies, between immersive LSD simulators in a marquee to multimedia mega-shows without batting an eye or adjusting their expectations. Of course, there's a hefty price tag attached, but once you're through the gates, Latitude makes the dream of theatre for all into a brief, sun-scorched reality. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.