LINEUP:
In The Eye of the Beholder by Liam Rees and Dylan Lowena
“Pretty privilege is the last acceptable form of bias”. Ted Chiang, Liking What You See: A Documentary.
In The Eye of The Beholder is a new experimental theatre piece created by award winning artists Liam Rees and Dylan Lowena.
Using live feed cameras trained on the audience this 20 minute scratch performance deconstructs beauty, bias, (mis)communication; whilst subverting the roles of audience and performer. But don't worry you won’t have to do anything yourself. You can just watch.
★★★★★ “totally human, and raw, and urgently, desperately necessary.” (Upper Circle on A Pint Sized Conversation)
★★★★ “an immersive company at the top of their game” (The Okayish on Let’s Talk)
Money for Footnotes by JC Niala
Money for Footnotes is a scratch performance that reimagines Penelope — the legendary weaver of The Odyssey — as an African woman waiting in the British High Commission visa office in Nairobi.
Here, weaving becomes survival, delay becomes strategy, and waiting is both political and deeply personal. As Penelope sits in bureaucratic limbo, myth collides with marriage, migration, love and paperwork. Drawing on African oral traditions, European classical forms and contemporary lived experience, the performance blends storytelling and live audience interaction to create something intimate, playful and unpredictable.
The audience becomes part of the waiting room: complicit witnesses to silence, humour and frustration. Through call-and-response and shared weaving spectators are gently pulled into Penelope’s fate and are asked not just to watch, but to wait alongside her.
Moving between comedy and vulnerability, the piece reveals the absurdities and violences of migration systems while holding space for resilience, desire and delight. 'Money for Footnotes' asks urgent questions with warmth and wit: What does it mean to wait for someone? For paperwork? For recognition? And who gets written into the story and who remains a footnote?
A bold, Afro-British reworking of a familiar myth, this work-in-progress invites audiences to encounter global entanglements up close and to find connection, humour and humanity in the queue.
Shambles by Thea Barnes
He can’t believe it! He has caught a feast! His family will be so proud!
But instead the dog walkers watch in horror, at the edge of a frozen lake, as they realise that their pampered pooch isn’t so cute after all...
Inspired by a true story, this theatrical comedy explores animality, and the extent to which you can domesticate your pet.
As the dog walkers desperately try to encourage their dog off the ice, they begin to show a difference in opinion.
“We should have trained him” versus “he’s just an animal”.
Tensions rise and rise. And eventually they don’t look too far from animals themselves...
Perhaps we are all holding a beast within.
“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
