Thurs 19 September | Deaths At Sea (Our Star Theatre)

A small theatre company are performing their new murder-mystery play ‘Death at Sea’, but despite their best efforts, everything goes wrong! 

Their play, ‘Death at Sea’, is a thrilling murder mystery set on a small ship carrying just five passengers and its Captain. When one of the passengers, Mr Inus, is found dead, the remaining passengers speculate and turn on each other until the real murderer is caught… But that isn’t how this play goes! 

In Death(s) at Sea props fail, the set falls down, actors get drunk and concussed, and conversations in the wings reveal too much. If they can only make it to the end of the play before one of them really kills someone!

Sat 5 October | The Jungle Book (Indigo Moon)

About Indigo Moon

Indigo Moon Theatre is best known as a Hull based Anglo-Indonesian children’s shadow puppet theatre company that has toured nationally and internationally to theatres, festivals and schools since 2001. Historically, their work combines traditions, techniques and styles from around the world, particularly from Europe and Indonesia. Their shows often carry important, transferable messages about the world around us.

Merging intricate colourful design, immersive original music, engaging storytelling and a combination of marionettes, rod puppets, live acting and shadow theatre – Indigo Moon Theatre brings new life to classic tales, such as Jungle Book, Aladdin and Alice and the White Rabbit, as well as creating their own original work. They have enjoyed hundreds of performances to date, as well as taking commissions for commercial ventures. You may have seen their work appear in the BBC TV programme Peaky Blinders, a Take That gig or in the latest Sir Kenneth Branagh film, A Haunting in Venice (with a spooky shadow theatre performance by IMT’s Anna Ingleby, scenery by Haviel Perdana, and characters designed by Susanna Samanek, who also designed the Jungle Book puppets). They also have a long history of educational workshops for children and adults.

Anna Ingleby
Anna studied puppetry in India and Indonesia and, with Haviel Perdana, has successfully created the Indigo Moon Theatre aesthetic of combining traditional puppetry styles with contemporary writing and theatre-making skills. Hand crafted sets, marionettes, rod puppets and shadow theatre are blended with acting and original music to share global stories with the audience.

Haviel Perdana
Haviel is an electro composer / musician, director and visual artist / painter from Indonesia. He co-devises shows, composes the music, leads workshops and creates scenery and puppets.
Keeping Things Fresh
Messages of self-belief, kindness and togetherness underpin Indigo Moon Theatre’s work. Contemporary issues, environmental concerns and climate change are explored, seeking to engage and inspire audiences.

Performance accessibility has always been important to Indigo Moon Theatre. Recently, they have been working to enhance audience engagement with the support of an accessibility consultant. The team is undergoing training to enable future integration of audio description within performances, offer touch tours and create safe spaces for everyone to enjoy their performances.
Looking at new ways of audience delivery and extending learning opportunities using technologies, such as Google Classroom will also enable more diverse audiences and voices to engage with their work.

Sun 6 October | The Best Life (Plough Youth Theatre)

The Best Life reminds us of a huge, transparent issue that we have forgotten about. The madness and pain of war, locked in Roksolana’s teenage heart, makes us both laugh and cry, while her sincerity about the family that remained in Ukraine makes us live through the fear together with her.

The debut of young scriptwriter, Kateryna Rudiakova, who at just 15 years of age found the courage and her voice to tell us about it from her point of view.

This is a Pay What You Can ticket price, all proceeds will be going towards the Plough Youth Theatre. Payment will be taken after the show.

Thurs 10 October | Sherlock Holmes – The Last Act

The year is 1916.

Drawn from two years of Sussex retirement for the funeral of his friend, Dr Watson, Holmes returns to Baker Street to resolve ‘the last act’ of his epic career.

A theatrical evening then unfolds, with fourteen characters, all played by Nigel Miles-Thomas in a tour de force performance.

Cross-examinations, heated arguments between Holmes and Watson, and all manner of comic and serious interactions, between many famous Conan Doyle characters.

As the play concludes the great detective reveals a shocking secret.

Written by Conan Doyle expert David Stuart Davies, directed by award-winning Gareth Armstrong.

‘Nigel Miles-Thomas plays Holmes with magical candour. Brilliant, Unmissable’ ***** (Noho Arts)

‘A Classy Holmes” **** (The Daily Mail)

‘There is nothing elementary about this production, top class’ *****(Glam)

‘A Firework display of Acting virtuosity’ ***** (Theatre Weekly)

Fri 18 October | Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me)

A one man staging of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and not like whatever came into your
head when you read the first bit of that sentence. Combining theatre, comedy and movement
this is a journey through the story of the creation of everything, condensed into 75 minutes.

It is a show which brings you the highlights of this well-known, but often forgotten story,
beginning with Lucifer’s rebellion and ending with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden
of Eden. A single man plays all the characters, creates all the scenes and, despite his best
efforts, falls a little short of perfection. A show for anyone who has created anything (child,
garden, paper aeroplane) and then watched it spiral out of control!

Age Guidance 13+

ABOUT LOST DOG

“We began with an idea and we continue to wrestle with it, to say what needs to be said and
dance the rest.”

Lost Dog is an award-winning dance/theatre company based in rural East Sussex and led by
director/choreographer Ben Duke. We aim to create and tour excellent shows widely and
well – with consideration for the planet, care for our staff and performers and generosity
towards our audiences. They treasure and celebrate the temporary community that is
created when people share time, space and air in a theatre – whether that theatre is a village
hall or a major metropolitan opera house. Their works on stage defy categorisation – ‘this
company…constantly walks a tightrope between opposites. They create dance, they create
theatre; they use words, they use dance; they offer wisdom, they offer foolishness; they
make you spring up in hope and they make you slump in despair. They are one of the most
fascinating theatre companies around.’ (The Observer, Feb 2022) – but at their heart there is
usually a familiar story or (often venerated) classic text which is retold, re-imagined or
reinvented through words, music and movement. Ben Duke has a talent for finding the
ordinary in the extraordinary, making great works entirely relatable to modern audiences,
seeing tragedy and comedy in the everyday. Their shows offer audiences an evening of
genuine, laugh out loud entertainment while quietly (sometimes loudly) breaking their hearts

Tue 22 October | Decommissioned

‘Cariad, I care about climate change too, but I live in a place where there are three buses a day and I can’t afford a Tesla!’

Elis wants to guide a class of ten-year-olds to become ‘ethical, informed citizens’. Gwen wants to tell the unvarnished truth – in the next 30 years the village they grew up in will be gone.

Inspired by the true story of Fairbourne in Wales, Decommissioned is a “heart-warming, comical, and intimate” play about how we’re meant to care for children, fall in love and stay sane while tackling the climate catastrophe.

Mon 28 October | Shivers & Shadows (Squashbox Theatre)

Recommended for brave children aged 6+ (accompanied by their scaredy-cat grown-ups)

Get ready to SHIVER, SHAKE, SHUDDER and SCREAM as Squashbox Theatre presents its first ever show for HALLOWEEN! Craig, your friendly host, has just inherited a creepy mansion from his Great Uncle Vladimir. Join him as he explores the mansion’s secrets and meets some of its strange and spooky inhabitants. What GHOULS and SPECTRES haunt the gloomy corridors of this old house?

Expect an overflowing cauldron of a show, brimming with DELIGHTFUL FRIGHTS and HILARIOUS HORRORS, bubbling with INGENIOUS PUPPETRY and COMEDY, seasoned with SCARY STORIES and TALL TALES, flavoured with LIVE MUSIC and SONGS, and topped with a sprinkling of SLAPSTICK and SILLINESS.

Tue 12 November | Fort (Dorsetborn)

1am. An Iron Age hillfort in North Dorset. Fifteen-year-old best friends, Viv and Daisy, wait for a ghost.

Away from dysfunctional families and small-town gossip, up on Fort, Viv and Daisy can be entirely themselves. With so much beyond their control, Fort is their stomping ground. Their escape. Until the ghost turns up.

Best friends for as long as they can remember, their bond has survived school bullies, witchcraft, jealousy and vengeful cows. But at the end of a summer when everything is changing, can it survive the ghost?

Originally drafted on a Royal Court Introductory Group, Fort was longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Masterclass Pitch Your Play Award.

Fri 15 November | There’s Something About Typhoid Mary (Living Spit)

Irish immigrant. Cook. Amiable host. Killer?

1906. New York City. Talented cook Mary Mallon takes a job preparing delicious meals for yet another high society family, and yet again they begin to fall ill and die. 

Coincidence? Mary thinks so. 

And now she’s put all that nonsense behind her. 

She’s cooking three courses for a very special guest tonight. YOU! 

That is unless Health Inspector and sanitation expert George Soper can stop her before it’s too late…

Prepare for a toe-tapping, germ-spreading extravaganza where the laughter is as infectious as Mary’s meals.  Featuring live cooking on stage from Stu Mcloughlin as the much-maligned Mary Mallon and Lucy Tuckas the germaphobic George Soper, There’s Something about Typhoid Mary is a contagiously entertaining journey through the dark and sinister world of the killer cook, Typhoid Mary, told with Living Spit’s trademark wit, song and silliness.

With live original music, deliciously tempting food which you can really eat (if you dare), gory deaths a-plenty, puerile puppetry and sackfuls of cross-dressing crassness, this promises to be a feverishly funny feast of fun for some of the family.

Just don’t mention the T-word.