The Red Chair

Description

Let us tell you a strange tale that did unfold someplace in the glum north o'the warld, where there lived a Man who could not stop eating, a Woman doomed to cook his meals and one 'inveesible child'. Told in a rich and saucy Scots dialect with physical verve, a wee dram of whisky to oil the way and a musical score that rolls in like mist over the hills, The Red Chair sees acclaimed Scottish performer Sarah Cameron steer us through a landscape of twisted reason, extreme compulsion and eye-watering complacency, where domestic drudgery happens on an operatic scale and a father's dereliction of duty reaches epic proportions. The Red Chair is based on Sarah's original book that had its first public reading as part of The House of Fairytales at the Port Eliot Festival. It lies somewhere between a Grimm's Tale, an absurdist ghost story and a parent's guide on how not to bring up children.

Sarah Cameron is an artist, performer and writer. Born in Dundee, she studied sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and theatre at Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She has worked extensively in theatre with companies including: Clod Ensemble, Royal Shakespeare Company, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Young Vic, where she was a resident member of the company that created the award-winning Grimm Tales directed by Tim Supple.

There are elements of fairy tale here, in the story and its method of telling, and yet this is a dance of sorts, with its rhythms and its stresses, and language - a kind of heightened Scots - is pivotal to the piece: words bend and sway and stretch . . . a hypnotic experience. * The Stage *