by Grace Bouchard
Perhaps one of the most shocking things about Border Control by Michelle Sewell is the fact that it was written five years ago, before Brexit and at the very beginning of the European Migrant Crisis.
relationships
Resonate, VAULT Festival
By Zahid Fayaz
This is the first preview performance of a one-man show following Jacob, a young man trying to turn over a new leaf away from his previous life as a hard-living and loving party animal. He’s doing this through Jesus and focusing on his education. He is, however, finding this difficult due to constant interruptions from his friends and ex-girlfriends whilst he is trying to finish an assignment.
Baaba’s Footsteps, VAULT Festival
By Keagan Fransch
Baaba’s Footsteps begins with a striking first image: Takako, a 16-year old woman embarking on a life-changing journey in Japan, 1920. She stands upright and wide-eyed; determined, stoic, hopeful, and perhaps a little naive, Takako gazes into the middle distance, willing her new life as a picture bride into existence with a desperate intensity. It is this image that Yu, Takako’s great-granddaughter, frantically chases a hundred years later. Yu works as a television director in Tokyo, talented and busy and upwardly mobile. However, when she is suddenly fired for having an affair with a married co-worker (who is then promoted to the position she was up for), she is forced to take stock of her life, and decides to retrace her great-grandmother’s footsteps to America to hopefully regain a sense of meaning and control.
She Is a Place Called Home, VAULT Festival
By Bryony Rae Taylor
She Is A Place Called Home explores how two sisters simultaneously support and frustrate each other as they prepare for their Dad’s controversial second marriage, which is not good news for his current wife, their mother.
If This Is Normal, VAULT Festival
by Zahid Fayyaz
This is a three-person play, following the lives and loves of a brother and sister, and their best friend, from when they first meet at school, to after graduation, to university. Along the way, their close friendship is threatened by various events and miscommunications. Developed with support from the Soho Theatre development labs, this is a punchy and kinetic show, in which the hour passes by in – almost – the blink of an eye.
This Queer House, VAULT Festival
by Keagan Fransch
Oli and Leah are a queer couple who have just inherited a house. Well, Oli has, and Leah as their devoted, loyal partner has come along for the ride despite her misgivings about what this milestone in normativity will do to their carefully curated queer existence. But with books going missing, wires tripping and odd sounds coming from the basement, it soon becomes clear that perhaps the house is just as unsure of them, as they are of it.
L I M B O, VAULT Festival
by Evangeline Cullingworth
Six young actors, maybe friends or maybe strangers, are stuck. They greet us when we enter and they are kind, but they do look a bit lost. They take turns to share important memories from their childhood, which sometimes fall out as fairytales or pop songs. Fragments of innocent childhoods which have slipped through fingers.
Meat, Theatre 503
by Laura Kressly
Two mouldering animal carcasses dangle from butchers hooks at the back of the stage. Glistening fat and muscle clinging to white bone waits to be turned into an expensive meal, then served at the high-concept restaurant’s table for two in the foreground. But fuzzy, green patches around the edge of the larger, more exposed dead body exude an unsettling energy – this meat is old, with the mould indicating a deeper, more insidious rot that’s not so easy to cut out.
Dumbledore is So Gay, VAULT Festival
by Dora Bodrogi
Forget trying to get your Friday Forty tickets to Cursed Child. Dumbledore is So Gay is a play so good you won’t need a philosopher’s stone to give you life.
Meet our hero, Jack – a teenage boy who hates French, got sorted into Hufflepuff, and who is in love with his best friend Ollie. Life is not going to be easy for him growing up gay during the heyday of Harry Potter. His story is told in three acts.
Omelette, VAULT Festival
by Lizzie Jackson
In the dark and atmospheric Cavern at the Vaults, theatre company Long Distance present us with their first play, Omelette. It explores many of the important questions on the climate crisis. How far should we go to save the planet? How far is too far? Does it make a difference? Should we give up coffee forever?
The Play's The Thing UK 