Poltergeist Theatre is a young and innovative company founded by LMH students. At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, they will be performing their dynamic new drama ‘xx’ (or ‘kiss kiss’), combining love, chance and mathematics to produce a unique performance every night. This exciting new project includes writer and director Jack Bradfield (1st year, English), marketing manager Claudia Graham (2nd year, English) and writer of the XX algorithm and assistant director Mitchell Skiles (Visiting student, Maths and Philosophy).
“you make me feel like numbers...”
xx, or "kiss kiss”, is a production of almost infinite possibilities. Five actors perform ten scenes about love. As becomes clear, there’s no accounting for the mathematics of desire. Two friends discuss a dangerous liaison while trying to hide a dead dog. A couple of strangers find love on the Bakerloo Line. Pagans gather in the park at night for a strange ritual...However xx is more than simply a string of casual encounters. There is some serious maths involved. Thanks to a fiendish algorithm developed by LMH mathematician Mitchell Skiles, the drama’s fixed points - five actors, ten scenes and five monologues - will be randomised every night. With over 36 trillion possible variations, audiences will never see the same play twice.
Wanting to explore the configurations of character and chance, writer and director Jack Bradfield and his talented cast developed the concept in rehearsal. The result is a set script for individual scenes, while the plot is entirely dependent on the Calculations of the Algorithm. We hope you will share in the actors’ terror and, hopefully, excitement as each night brings a new character, a new circumstance and a new chronology. A minimal set with moveable props adds to the fluidity of this highly physical performance. We hope audiences with re-visit the show during their time in Edinburgh to see how the play mutates and multiplies.
Poltergeist Theatre is a young and innovative company founded by LMH students. It aspires to collaborative, entertaining and boundary-breaking theatre - the kind that will haunt you all the way home. Since its inception last year, Poltergeist has produced three plays, most notably a sell-out, five-star revival of Ben Travers’ Thark (February 2016). Jack Bradfield has written several award-winning scripts including Beastly Plebeians (2015) which was performed as a rehearsed reading at the National Theatre: “Extraordinarily ambitious...the writing is, line by line, surprising and confident” (Ben Power, Deputy Artistic Director, National Theatre).
Venue: The Annexe: Paradise in the Vault, Paradise Green
Time: 18.55
Run: Saturday 6 August to Sunday 28 August (excluding Sunday 14 and Sunday August 21)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xxkisskissplay/?fref=ts
Twitter: @xx_kisskiss
More information about cast and crew, contact Georgia Crump: georgia.crump@st-annes.ox.ac.uk