King's Head Theatre - Spring 2016
Season preview
THE KING’S Head Theatre has announced its Spring 2016 season and it includes the UK premiere of award-winning Australian drama Strangers In Between; Edinburgh cabaret transfers Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens and Sing For Your Life, a musical comedy taxidermy puppet show from avant-garde performance artist, Charlie Tuesday Gates; and the first major revival of Howard Brenton’s Christie In Love.
SEASON IN FULL
Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens – April 26 to May 21 at 8:45pm.
Kick back for an inter-galactic disco extravaganza that explodes all around you. Indulge in some killer entertainment in Saucy Jack’s club and rub shoulders with the cosmic cast at the fully functioning bar. Having delighted audiences on three continents, including three West End runs, this Fringe First-winning cult hit has
returned to London.
Sing For Your Life – April 27 to May 21 at 7pm.
Notorious taxidermy artist Charlie Tuesday Gates has scraped up roadkill, bought deceased dogs on GumTree and revived her family pet to bring you this 5*, death-defying and hilariously unsettling musical comedy… starring real dead animal puppets. Hold on to your conscience – it’s the greatest show that ever died! Described as a shocking, nauseating and sidesplitting comedy, Sing For Your Life explores Charlie Tuesday Gates’ ongoing work on animal cruelty, and our hypocritical relationship to the natural world.
Christie in Love – May 25 to June 18 at 7pm.
Between 1943 and 1953, John Christie killed eight women, and hid their bodies around the Notting Hill boarding-house – 10 Rillington Place – where he lived. In Howard Brenton’s 1969 award-winning play, Christie shuffles through a mass of newsprint, wittily parrying the questions of policemen whose misogyny matches his own. Smutty limericks, an inflatable woman, a stunning sequence of hallucinatory theatrical images, an indictment of a hypocritical and prurient press, and a subtle exploration of the dictum that ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.
Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love provides a chilling insight into the mind of John Christie, one of the twentieth centuries most notorious serial killers.
Big Brother Blitzkrieg – May 26 to June 18 at 8:30pm.
After a botched suicide attempt Adolf Hitler awakes to find himself in the Big Brother House. Confused by his situation and surrounded by some of the most loathsome individuals he’s ever met, he struggles to come to terms with the world of reality television. Join Adolf on the journey of a lifetime as he makes friends, faces demons and finds his true voice. But will he win over the hearts and minds of the viewers in the process?
Bitter Pill’s satire of reality TV returns to the King’s Head following sell-out London and Edinburgh runs and with Donald Trump being seen as a serious Presidential contender the subject matter has never felt more topical.
Strangers In Between – June 22 to July 16 at 8:30pm.
Shane is sixteen, cute and scared sh*tless. After an abrupt and brutal beating from his brother, he’s fled rural Australia for downtown Sydney. Adrift among the lonely hearts of King’s Cross, Shane attempts to wrestle with the shades of his past and make sense of new relationships in an unfamiliar world.
The King’s Head Theatre presents the UK premiere of Tommy Murphy’s critically acclaimed drama. In equal parts humorous and poignant, Strangers In Between is an uncompromising portrait of family, friendship and sexuality in modern Australia.
After the critical and commercial success of Trainspotting, Artistic Director of the King’s Head Theatre, Adam Spreadbury-Maher returns to the director’s chair for Strangers in Between. First staged by Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company in February 2005, Murphy’s play won the New South Wales Premiere literary award.
Adam Spreadbury-Maher comments: ‘I’m delighted to be bringing this brilliant play by one of Australia’s finest playwrights to audiences in London for the first time.’
Also at the King’s Head Theatre: Something Something Lazarus, a new British musical and dark comedy about resurrections, second chances and the healing power of performance (March 8 to April 2) and To Kill a Machine, which tells the life-story of war-time cryptanalyst Alan Turing through the lens of a gameshow (April 6 to April 23, 2016).