Salamèche

London’s hottest new play, but somehow performed by two performance art weirdos on a shoe-string budget.
– Ben Kulvichit, Exeunt Magazine

Swan Song: a work-in-progress was a collaboration with playwright Andy Grace Edwards. We commissioned Grace to write us a play that they would never otherwise be able to write. They irreverently adapted a little-known short play by Anton Chekhov into a three-act time-travelling epic, about an ageing actor, a cowardly revolutionary, a writer with harrowing premonitions, and a pair of militant genderqueer environmentalist twins from the future. With minimal resources, Rohanne and Paul juggled all twelve roles – dashing between chairs and scripts and genders in an attempt to keep up with an increasingly-unlikely plot.

Permanently eschewing ‘proper’ staging, Swan Song was developed and presented through ‘work-in-progress’ presentations, taking place in rehearsal studios. The project used and exploited the form of the script-reading (usually a substitute for the ‘real thing’) to enact a narrative that was otherwise impossible to stage. Straddling rehearsal and reality, the performance invited to the audience to imagine some ‘finished’ future show, while enjoying the irreverent and playful potentials of its unfinished state.

Made within a climate of austerity, this performance was our gleeful and desperate attempt to summon ‘grand theatre’, without having permission or access to main stages. Swan Song embraces the pleasures and perils of pretending to be something you’re not, in order to rethink your place in the historical movements that will outlive us all.

Residencies and presentation: CCA Glasgow (2020), Dance4 (Nottingham; 2021), Sadler’s Wells Theatre (London; 2022), National Theatre Scotland (Glasgow; 2022) and Nonsuch Studios (Nottingham; 2022) and Old Diorama Arts Centre (London; 2023).

Additional development: Playwrights Studio Scotland (Glasgow) and Nottingham Playhouse in 2020; and S’ALA (Sassari) in 2022.

This project has been supported by funding from Arts Council England.

Photos by Cheniece Warner.