Slung Low Presents: Beyond The Frontline
Beyond The Frontline is Slung Low's latest extravaganza. It is an immense outdoor installation about fallen soldiers and has now officially kicked off at The Lowry in Salford after some excellent previews. It is press night tonight, so hopefully I'll have some reviews for you soon, but the show runs three performances per night right up until the 17th October. It really is a cracking piece by all accounts, featuring new short plays by Joel Horwood, John Hunter, Chris Thorpe, and myself, plus a cast of two-hundred and a newly written requiem. If you are nearby, in fact if you are in the UK, get yourself down there. Just click the link to The Lowry above for details of performances and tickets.
Here's some words of wisdom from our artistic director during an interview with Kevin Bourke for City Life. It sums the show up better than most blurbs:
The concept is that Salford is under attack from the enemy and the British Army have taken up positions to defend it. The audience, as UN inspectors with total access to the facility, takes centre stage, starting in the VIP tent.
“From there,” discloses Artistic Director Alan Lane, “the audience will be split up into smaller groups and taken to one of four trucks.
“In each of them, there will be completely different actors with completely different scripts by different writers.
“They’ll each engage with the audience in a completely different way, creating a different reality for that 20 minutes.
"Then the audience all come together again for the final bit of the show and how the audience talk about their different experience is part of the show also...
“Perhaps people have become immune to the things they’re now seeing every day on their TV and perhaps the show will make people think a little differently about what they’re seeing.
“At its simplest, the show is a requiem. It’s a way of paying tribute to people who we train and arm and then send off to do our bidding.
"That’s a completely different topic from whether they should be there or not.
“Those men don’t choose and we don’t want them to choose. In return, we undertake a covenant to look after them and their families.
"When we started working on the show, that covenant had been broken but the situation has changed somewhat and the show became more of a tribute, a requiem for fallen soldiers.”
Cheers,
Scotty
Here's some words of wisdom from our artistic director during an interview with Kevin Bourke for City Life. It sums the show up better than most blurbs:
The concept is that Salford is under attack from the enemy and the British Army have taken up positions to defend it. The audience, as UN inspectors with total access to the facility, takes centre stage, starting in the VIP tent.
“From there,” discloses Artistic Director Alan Lane, “the audience will be split up into smaller groups and taken to one of four trucks.
“In each of them, there will be completely different actors with completely different scripts by different writers.
“They’ll each engage with the audience in a completely different way, creating a different reality for that 20 minutes.
"Then the audience all come together again for the final bit of the show and how the audience talk about their different experience is part of the show also...
“Perhaps people have become immune to the things they’re now seeing every day on their TV and perhaps the show will make people think a little differently about what they’re seeing.
“At its simplest, the show is a requiem. It’s a way of paying tribute to people who we train and arm and then send off to do our bidding.
"That’s a completely different topic from whether they should be there or not.
“Those men don’t choose and we don’t want them to choose. In return, we undertake a covenant to look after them and their families.
"When we started working on the show, that covenant had been broken but the situation has changed somewhat and the show became more of a tribute, a requiem for fallen soldiers.”
Cheers,
Scotty
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Add a Comment
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Comment by Peter Cox MBE on October 9, 2009 at 5:42
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That's an excellent review Matthew, congratulations to all involved. Gives a real flavour of the event without giving everything away. It's also a sad, but not unexpected, indictment of the national reviewing press that the Lowry Press Office had to be so 'pathetically' (my word) grateful for a national reviewer trekking all that way 'oop North'.
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Comment by Matthew David Scott on October 9, 2009 at 5:16
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Here's the first bit of feedback we've had:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/oct/09/slung-low-beyond-the-frontline
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P.S - Can somebody PLEASE show me how to do tags? This is becoming embarrassing!
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