• Every Mayfest boasts one or two stand-out, off-the-wall delights – shows boasting Herculean staging demands (like last year’s ‘Electric Hotel’) or promising to subtly alter the emotional co-ordinates of all who see it (see last year, again, and the emotional, intimate ‘Internal’). This year’s eye-catcher is ‘Save Me’, a semaphore soap opera performed, using giant flags, by Bristol performance duo Search Party. Performers Pete Phillips and Jodie Hawkes will converse over 11 days using the flag semaphore system, building up a narrative over time: audiences, bystanders, commuters and city strollers are invited to get involved and steer the story. “Often the audience try to manipulate the piece into a love story, offering advice on how we should make up or hold out for an apology,” says Pete, reflecting on past performances, including a session on London’s South Bank. “The mood is always very hopeful – the audience are willing the connection to succeed.” SP will spend Mayfest on the Floating Harbour – Pete at Cascade Steps, Jodie on Pero’s Bridge – and will invite audiences and passers-by to decode messages and send their own. “You can engage with the performance in various ways – visually it’s quite arresting, which makes a nice contrast with the often day-to-day nature of the conversation.” Pete recommends returning to the piece often over its 11-day run, to engage with its distinctive rolling narrative. Audiences are also invited to leave their own stories of when they have been apart from someone. “We provide tags and pens for people to leave their own stories as a memorial to the people they miss, which we’ll weave into the dialogue.”
• Splendid news, this: a first Mayfest visit by those masters of pungent puppetry and on-stage oddity, Faulty Optic. FO have been renowned since the 80s for their highly visual adult puppetry theatre, with puppeteers hidden in the shadows dressed head to foot in black. ‘Flogging…’ focuses less on the puppets and more on those performers – two of whom stage a series of ridiculous scientific experiments in an attempt to unscramble the secrets of the brain. The puppets are subjected to a series of tests involving Rorschach blots, found sounds, miniature ping pong, embarrassing dances and more. “These slightly disturbing and disturbed figures are obviously being manipulated by the actors, as if they are part of some strange game,” explains FO founder Gavin Glover. “The performers are investigating the deepest, darkest recesses of the human brain – that hermit-like place where we can ponder life, indulge our personal philosophies and confuse fact with fiction.” Influences on the show include films like David Lynch’s nightmarish ‘Eraserhead’, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller ‘Pi’ and the Woody Allen canon. “The title comes from the idiom meaning ‘to pursue a solution long realized to be unsolvable’,” says Gavin, “but the show is also, as the phrase conjures up, funny and touching, bizarre and cruel.”
• This one’s the latest from Little Bulb Theatre, a leftfield and hugely talented five-piece whose previous shows ‘Crocosmia’ and ‘Sporadical’ have drawn gasps of admiration in Bristol and beyond. Like those two, ‘Greenfield’ centres on the creativity and emotional turbulence of adolescence. Somewhere in Middle England, four unlikely teenagers are preparing for judgment day – or, to be more precise, their town’s Annual Talent Competition. With a stage full of instruments and an eclectic mix of recorded music, Little Bulb explore faith, friendship and the confusing, awkward and naïve time of adolescence. “We are a young company, so these themes of childhood are in our most immediate history, which gives us a fresh take on them,” explains director Alex Scott. “We're interested in how the creation of characters merges with our personal histories, so that a weird hybrid emerges – part persona, part character.” ‘Greenfield’, Alex says, gets to the core of the awkwardness of teenage life – and celebrates all the comedy and drama therein. “The portrayal of the young can so often be really badly handled on stage. A lot of shows tend to focus on a dark and very dramatic side to youth culture, whereas we’re more interested in exploring an unsensationalised world on a minute level – while at the same time running wild with a blend of fantasy and reality. “We hope the story gently subverts your expectations about teenagers – especially Christian ones. The mood is constantly changing: funny, melodramatic, plain bizarre. It speaks to our own personal experiences and hopefully challenges the way we view and understand young people.” After seeing the show at Edinburgh, The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner labelled the company “so recklessly talented you want to hug them and keep them safe in case they spoil. Their musicianship is superb, and their ability to conjure the pains of youth uncanny.”
• First performed at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe and now reworked specially for Mayfest, ‘Ousia’ (an ancient Greek word meaning ‘substance’ or ‘essence’) is a striking solo dance piece created by Darren Johnston, a choreographer whose immersive dance/theatre/installation hybrids have included collaborations with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. This one follows a solo dancer in a stark white room as she delves deep into her solitary existence. Through a hazy, strobe-filled space, and using a mix of holograms, dance and projection technology, the dancer’s ritualistic patterns slowly conjure up a clone-like avatar. A mix of the magical and the monstrous, ‘Ousia’ sets out to recreate the world of the Victorian illusionist. “I've always been fascinated by illusion, otherworldliness and things that trick the eye,” says Johnston. “The wonderful thing about projection is that it allows you to do that.” Like his previous show, 2007’s “technology-led freak-show cabaret” ‘Outre’, ‘Ousia’ exists in a borderland between horror and loveliness. “It has the same levels of freakishness and suspense: you're not sure what you're seeing until the end. In the West, horror is always grotesque and disgusting [Johnston’s aesthetic was influenced by a period spent in Japan], but when it's depicted with beauty it's much more captivating.”
• Devised by a quartet of gifted comic actors, this “comedy thriller” follows a stag do that ends up getting very weird indeed in the remote Icelandic wastes. ‘The Summer House’ is the brainchild of actor Neil Haigh (of Mayfest faves Cartoon de Salvo), Will Adamsdale (he of the splendid motivational-speaker skit ‘Jackson’s Way’), TV comic actor Matthew Steer and John Wright, founder of companies Trestle and Told By An Idiot. At the fag end of an epic stag weekend in Reykjavik, three men (including the groom and best man) travel through the dark, featureless Icelandic countryside to a remote summer house, apparently owned by one of the trio. Rather than the expected beers and hot-tub hedonism, what ensues involves a clash between the men’s high-tech, cosseted lifestyles and the ancient myths and spirits of Iceland. “These three are the last ones standing at the end of the night, not wanting the party to end,” Neil explains. “My character’s a kind of drifter, unlike the other two who are much more conventional: careers, family, so on. He takes them out to his ‘summer house’ and, as the evening goes on, you realise that there is more to this character than first meets the eye. The myths and pagan past are still very much alive in the landscape around them.” Things also get more playful and fourth-wall-breaking as the evening goes on. “It becomes clear that even these actors are not in control of their world. We sow seeds in the audience’s minds and leave them to unravel mysteries and make connections.”
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