Lost in Blue - London's Roundhouse and on tour
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
WRITTEN and performed by Debs Newbold, Lost in Blue will visit London’s Roundhouse on June 5, 2016, as part of a national tour.
Debs Newbold, highly celebrated performer and Shakespeare’s Globe storyteller, delivers a touching, funny, cinematic and surreal one-woman show enhanced by live music technology.
Through the prism of Vincent van Gogh’s recognisable late work, Bedroom in Arles, she explores the phenomenon of living life in a coma and the healing power of art.
When she was three years old, Annie’s life was skewed off-course. On her 18th birthday, it threatens to happen again. What is it like to be in a coma? To love someone in a coma? What would van Gogh say about it if you hung out with him in his room at Arles? And what does a pigeon called Muhammad Ali eat for breakfast?
The piece is directed by internationally renowned teacher and director John Wright, also known as a founding member of acclaimed theatre companies Trestle and Told by an Idiot.
Describing the work, Debs Newbold said: “This show started off as a niggling thought about the voice. I’d just lost my nan, who had an extraordinary voice, a cheeky Brum-Irish lilt totally unique to her. I knew I had a recording of her voice on a minidisc (remember those?), but it was ages before I could bring myself to listen to it.
“Hearing the recorded voice of a loved one who has died is as near to an encounter with a ghost as I can imagine. It’s as if they inhabit the air in the room with you for a moment, and I began to get ideas about a person who manages to be both absent and present at the same time. That’s where the image of a man in a coma came from. I saw him and I saw his daughter, like a painting. He lying on a bed, she looking out of a window, waiting. Another woman too, unable to speak. And that’s where it began.”
Lost in Blue is presented by Nimble Fish theatre compny.
The tour will visit Drill Hall, Lincoln (March 9), Fraser Hall, Cowan Bridge (March 11), Ingol Library, Preston (March 12), Studio at Clair Hall, Haywards Heath (April 2), Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch (April 11), Square Chapel, Halifax (April 22), Cast, Doncaster (April 24), Evergreen Hall, Broadwell (April 28), Roundhouse, London (June 5), West End Centre, Aldershot (October 6), Brewhouse Arts Centre, Burton-on-Trent (November 3), Matlock Storytelling Café, Matlock (November 4) and The Arts Centre, Ormskirk (November 8).