These jam-packed platforms are highlights of any CPT season: the place to see wild and wonderful new projects take their first steps.
Each bill features mix of artists or companies performing fresh-from-the-rehearsal-room work-in-development. They’re doing so because they want to know what works and what doesn’t, and they’d love you to tell them. So please join us for – and share your thoughts on – these exclusive previews of tomorrow’s most exciting theatre, today.
A sentence a day (keeps the doctor away) by Rosie Gray
What if you were once fighting fear so hard you grew too scared to write
And you could only manage to write a sentence,
a sentence a day,
For 1,460 days of your life.
A sentence a day explores how much we’re willing to engage with fragmentation and why we’re seduced by linearity and neatness. Why do we need it when that’s not how we live? What happens when stories can’t sum it up? Is gaffer tape better than glue?
The show will explore the brain, love, sexuality, unsolicited advice, e-t-c. (and unconnected things you may or may not find funny).
It will feature words.
And maybe visuals and sounds for when the words didn’t come.
You should come.
Please do.
Multi storey car parks remind me of you.
Elsewhere 在别处 by Out of the Blue Theatre Company
Shuyan 书燕 is your typical Chinese student– smart, hardworking, and with mountain-high expectations, filial but uninspired. With a perfect life track record, she is bound to break through something beyond your imagination.
But now she struggles to finish her PhD application and everything is falling apart. ‘What do you really want?’ the existential question from her frustrated parents wakes her up to a living nightmare. Shuyan decides to run elsewhere, will she find the way out there?
‘Elsewhere 在别处’ juxtaposes writer-performer Haylin Cai’s own experiences battling against depression with strange tales. It is a show created with honesty and playfulness, unique to her Chinese background in fusing with her lived experience as a migrant artist in the UK.
Watch the trailer for Elsewhere 在别处 here.
Sam Ward
2022 Off West End Award nominees YESYESNONO Productions are back. This is a scratch performance for a new solo, experimental storytelling show written and performed by Sam Ward. Sam doesn't know exactly what it's going to be yet. But it's probably going to be about history and about time and possibly about a town in the 20th century that vanished overnight. It might also not be about those things. I haven't 'started' 'work' on it properly yet. Let's find out.
This Big Bang is taking place in CPT's basement space (with step-free access)
“British theatre would be completely stymied without tiny, under-resourced venues such as CPT, which are a critical part of the theatre ecology.”
Lyn Gardner Stagedoor
