Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.

Until mid-March, this newsletter is focusing on VAULT Festival. Every Monday, I am sending out issues featuring five shows worth seeing at VAULT that week - this is the third of those - and on Fridays, I am sending out your regular, in-depth interviews, plenty of which will focus on artists performing at VAULT, too.

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That’s all for now. More from me at the bottom, but first: five shows to see at VAULT Festival this week!

Five shows to see in week three of VAULT Festival.

Swarm - Liv Ello

In 2015, David Cameron referred to migrants attempting to reach Britain by crossing the English channel as “a swarm.” This solo show, written, directed and performed by Liv Ello, started as a response to that comment, and as a satirical survey of our country’s attitudes towards immigration.

Swarm was a hit at last August’s Edinburgh Fringe – critic Sally Stott called it “invigoratingly nerve-wracking” in her four-star review for The Scotsman – and when it ran at Camden People’s Theatre last November. Now it arrives at VAULT as winner of the festival’s Pick Of The Pleasance Award.

It sees Ello – dressed as a giant, four-armed, green-goggled fly – introduce the audience to various characters from contemporary British society, all also imagined as various varieties of fly, and their awkward, alarming, uncomfortable opinions on migrants. Augmented by projected video, it slides from clownish character comedy into something a lot more serious. The Guardian’s Rachel Healy gave it four stars, and called it “poignant and confronting.”

Book tickets here

Police Cops: Badass Be Thy Name - Police Cops

Police Cops is a three-man comedy troupe – comprising performers Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe – that has been making entertainingly anarchic, genre-inspired shows since 2014, selling out at several successive Edinburgh Fringes and getting showered with awards in the process.

First came Police Cops, then Police Cops in Space, then Police Cops: Badass Be Thy Name. Then, the company branched out: Police Cops: The Musical received its world premiere at the New Diorama Theatre in late 2021.

For VAULT Festival, Hunt, Parkinson and Roe are returning to their third show, Badass Be Thy Name. Set in a gritty northern town in 1999, it is a kitchen-sink-drama-cum-vampire-slaying-horror-epic. Expect physical comedy, slapstick silliness, cinema references, rave music, and plenty of infectious (get it?) corpsing.

Book tickets here

The Silver Bell - Alan Flanagan

Award-winning Irish writer Alan Flanagan works across film, television, radio and theatre: he has made several successful shorts, is a regular with Channel 4’s Hollyoaks, has produced audio dramas for Big Finish Productions and the BBC, and has written several small-scale stage shows, too.

The Silver Bell is his latest, arriving at VAULT Festival after running at Islington’s King’s Head Theatre, Dublin’s International Gay Theatre Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Directed by Barrel Organ Theatre’s Dan Hutton, it is “a play about love and loss, with a sci-fi twist.”

Mico (played by Flanagan himself) has just lost the love of his life, James (played by Irish actor Brendan O’Rourke), to motor neurone disease. Instead of grieving, though, he punches a whole in the universe, and travels to parallel worlds to bring his beloved back. Playwright Mark Ravenhill called it “a queer, Irish, multiverse story of great heart and intelligence.”

Book tickets here

This Is The Land - Mary Steadman

Few shows at VAULT Festival this year sound more intriguing and atmospheric than This Is The Land. Conceived by academic, lecturer and director Mary Steadman as part of her PhD research into spectrality and hauntology, it is a five-handed, multi-media performance into “thin places” - locales where “the distance between living and non-living is blurred.”

The five international performers – Xavier De Santos, Samuel De La Torre, Alice Barton, Leeza Jessie and Sofia Velez - use recorded sound from composer John Baggott, live vocal-looping, folk music, rave music, movement and dance to evoke themes of rebirth and resilience, memory and longing, trespass and dispossession, journeying and hope, all structured around the cycle of seasons. Do not expect a straightforward narrative, Steadman says. Instead, expect “a symphony of stories”, “an eerie sense of landscape” and “an unsettling feeling of presence existing where logically it should not.”

This Is The Land has already been performed in Bristol and in Belgium. It will run at VAULT Festival over this weekend and next, and Steadman has plans to take it elsewhere as well. “It is a very fluid piece,” she says. “It is very adaptable. It can be performed in theatre and non-theatre spaces. We have already performed it in a chapel, and we are excited to develop it in different ways from here.”

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Book tickets here

Counter - Maggie N Razavi

Counter, a new two-hander from Iranian-Swedish writer and director Maggie N Razavi, focuses on a long-term relationship that has reached its breaking point. After ten years together, two university sweethearts – played by Rivkah Bunker and Max Norman – have to decide whether to stay together or split up. The innovative twist is that the audience gets to decide what happens.

Throughout the hour-long play, which will be performed on Saturday and Sunday this week, before returning for a two-night run at The Thin White Duke in Soho in April, both characters break the fourth wall to discuss their situation with the audience. Razavi has written two alternate endings, and, at the play’s conclusion, it the audience will vote on which one gets performed.

“I think a lot of theatre can feel stiff and disengaging,” says Razavi. “With Counter, I wanted to create something that people could not only relate to, but react to, as well. I wanted to create something that questions the lack of communication, the insecurities, and the lack of self-knowledge that comes with being in a long-term relationship. And I would love to take this further somehow, too. We are performing it again in April, and we are looking to turn it into a short film as well.”

This is promotional content.

Book tickets here

That’s it for now. There won’t be an issue this Friday, as I’m away again, but I will be back in your inboxes on Monday with five more shows to see at VAULT Festival in week four.

One final reminder about the various ways you can support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might be interested, you can become a paid subscriber using the button at the top, or you can get in touch with me about using it for promotional purposes.

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That’s all. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch for any reason, just reply to this email or contact me via Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. See you in a week!

Fergus

The Crush Bar

Five shows to see during week three of VAULT…