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The Old Abattoir, Clerkenwell, London

Oct 2009

Guerilla Zoo and Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Promptly at 7.30 a beautiful woman appeared, elegant in chic red, her martinet manner slightly undermined by a gentleness behind the eyes. The programme says she's Tacuinum, which perhaps relates to an Arabic medieval medical manuscript called Taqwin al-sihla - when translated into Latin it became known as Tacuinum Sanitas, but there is no way at this stage of knowing that, nor is their really any way of discovering who the other people, animals or beings you are going to meet are called or exactly what they are. If there is a story it is fragmented and up to you to put together. If there is a mystery to be solved you have to find it, quite apart from discovering a solution. Tacuinum issues strict instructions about guest behaviour, for the premise is that you are invited to a party that celebrates the publication of the latest work of a famous horror story writer, Helen Mayer. Most importantly you must be silent, as the beings you meet will constantly remind you with fingers to their lips, and you are warned that you may have to go really close to hear what some of them are saying.
- Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide

2009

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Piece

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11

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The Arcola Theatre has another new space, an industrial building behind the present one, which officially opens in July as Studio K but is now the site for this promenade production which takes its audiences back to 1957 and the village of Seascale on the Cumbrian coast, where the Windscale nuclear reactors and Calder Hall nuclear power station had been built in the preceding years. It's relevant, for those who may not be aware, that in October that year a fire destroyed the core of one of the Windscale Piles releasing radioactive material into the environment, including Iodine-131, which can by taken up by the thyroid gland. Nearly fifty years later, in 2005, a Magnox reprocessing plant on the same site leaked radioactive waste. Soil samples taken by Greenpeace over 11km from the site were found in tests by scientists at Bremen University to have radioactive contamination with Americium-241 400 times higher than those taken the same distance from Chernobyl. In 1957 milk and other farm produce in surrounding areas had to be destroyed - but what about the people? Writer and director John Harrigan here presents a poetic look at the effects. Note his title Cirxus, a mutation from Circus, for here he presents a group of characters from a circus changed by their exposure to radiation. They inhabit a barren industrial space with some boxed in areas making small rooms. An elephant painted on a wall is a reminder of the animal acts, a banner or sign indicates a side show but you are not here to see their performance in the ring. A bath full of sand, some palettes with beach toys are a reminder that this is by the seaside, strings of coloured lights are a sad reminder of past brightness.
- Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide

North Herts College Hitchin, UK

1991

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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John Harrigan's Enochian Language of Angels was another controversial play influenced by near death experiences, the visiting of heaven and hell and the sphere of good and evil. A clear confrontation with the inevitable choices of death was translated on to stage imaginatively by the writer. it is a subject we hear and read about so often and yet rarely have the courage to analyse such possible realities. Asmadai the role of dilemma was interpreted originally by John Harrigan. This proved to be a powerful and shocking play full of the brazen symbolism of this borderline state, containing interesting angles on life. - Sophi Cockayne: Comet Leisure

The Abattoir, Clerkenwell, London

14 Feb 2010

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

site specific

Play/Drama

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Another of Foolish People's atmospheric site-specific productions, this one set in what is supposed to be the Club Aethereus on Valentine's Day. It is a very strange kind of club owned by the mysterious Sebastian Qyain who seems to be trying to get his hands on something or someone. There is what seems to be a cabaret area with a stage marked out by a bulb-illuminated cat-walk but it embraces all sorts of other locations too among the pillared and vaulted halls and strange rooms of the Abattoir's three floors. There is a tea room where you may be offered cakes and scones as the Welsh waitress tells you about her love life, a hotel room where unpleasantness happen, a doctor's office and her consulting room, a strange place, part tent part tumbled-down shack, where a receptionist seems more like a controller, a washroom-cum-dressing room where cabaret girls congregate and may confess their romantic disappointments or challenge you with your own erotic failures. Then there are the Valentinians - are they a family or a secret society? - represented by a mysterious woman in black and red who want someone to find a missing woman called Pearl who seems to have been abducted. Perhaps the waif-like creatures whom you may encounter anywhere performing their slow, contorted choreography are Valentinians too.
- Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide

North Herts College Letchworth, UK

1994

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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A group of friends meet each year to play with death.

Camden Peoples Theatre, London

2004

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Ruined Steel Featured world famous burlesque artist Valeria Dragova and Katarina Severen AKA Nikita the UK's most famous female pro wrestler.Ruined Steel was written and directed by John Harrigan.

Ruined Steel blended Modern theatre with Science Fiction, Horror and Anime to create art that hacked reality.Who owns your soul? Have you already sold it to your corporate masters for survival? Would it be Heaven or Hell if they could keep you alive perpetually without your permission, as long as it served their brand? Because soon, even the afterlife may be digitized. Those who've sold their souls should be thankful for their fate with the devil, because Hell has nothing on Ruined Steel.

The Barn Theatre, Welwyn Garden City, UK

2002

Foolish People

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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It began millions of years ago with an inexplicable event that ignited the spark of human consciousness, transforming animal into man, and now it happens again as two black holes collide and create the gravity wave that will carry the entity that is the singularity to us. The Singularity has decided that Mankind must answer for its actions whether it wishes to or not, before it can play a role in the evolution of the species. Now two lives are about to become inextricably tangled in the Singularity. Dr Ruth Bell, the survivor of a tragic human event and Rebecca Beelz, a human who must control others to survive. It will kindle their wildest dreams - and fan their darkest fears. Now, the Singularity enters its perilous, ultimate stage. A single hope flickers. Is humanity ready to learn the awe-inspiring truth?