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Home > Festival > Festival showcases a Hotbed of new theatre in Cambridge

Festival showcases a Hotbed of new theatre in Cambridge

By Caroline King - June 28, 2018Posted in : Festival, Theatre

Hotbed theatre festival 2018 - Cambridge - Underneath

Fishamble’s Underneath

When: 6th & 7th July 2018

Where: Cambridge Junction, Clifton Way, Cambridge CB1 7GX

£: Individual tickets start at £5. Day tickets (with entry to all events) cost £12 – £20

What is it?

Hotbed is a festival of new theatre, hosted by the Menagerie Theatre Company at Cambridge Junction.  This year’s festival will take place on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th July.

This year, Hotbed welcomes back the internationally acclaimed Irish theatre company Fishamble, with their Olivier Award-winning production of Silent and their new work Underneath.

Silent is a brave, bleak and beautiful production that follows the story of homeless McGoldrig who has lost it all;  including his mind.  Underneath is a blackly comic, rich and vivid tale of a life lived in secret, a testament to the people who live on the fringes of society.  It asks the questions: ‘Is beauty really only skin deep?’ and ‘Does ugliness hide somewhere deeper?’

Hotbed also welcomes back one of Menagerie’s young writers, Maria Montague, with a production that marks the English-language premiere of Maklena, translated from the Ukrainian original.  In a dynamic adaptation of the 1933 play, this production incorporates puppetry and an original score to tell the story of a 13-year-old girl who fixates on a fairy-tale vision of the Soviet Union.

The Activate Project with Coleridge Community College is another Hotbed highlight.  This year, Activate presents The Museum of Maps.  Uncovering stories of Cambridge that have not yet been heard, biography mixes freely with fantasy to create this unique performance installation.

Audiences will have the chance to meet the map-makers and life-dreamers, whose original work is inspired by artists they have worked with in the past year of the Activate Project.  The performance is hosted and performed by students from Coleridge Community College.

The festival will also feature a reading of a new play by Bruntwood Award-winning writer Janice Okoh, and a workshop by Fraser Grace.

Menagerie Theatre Company is an independent new writing theatre company in the East of England.  Based in Cambridge, they have been creating theatre for over eighteen years and have a regional, national and international reputation for the development of first-class new writing for the stage.  As well as touring widely, they run workshops, writer development courses and produce the annual Hotbed festival in Cambridge.

More info: www.junction.co.uk/events/hotbed-festival, hotbedtheatrefestival.com and www.menagerie.uk.com

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Tagged With: Cambridge Junction, Cambridgeshire events, East

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