Ovalhouse Theatre Spring 2013 Season

The Ovalhouse Theatre, a fringe venue in south London, has announced its Spring 2013 season, which includes Counterculture 50 an event that celebrates 50 years at Ovalhouse Theatre, a fringe venue in south London. It runs from 29 Jan to 2 March 2013, with 5 new plays to mark each decade. Looking back at its role in the growth of the experimental theatre movement of the '60s and '70s, the emergence of gay, lesbian and women's theatre in the '70s and '80s and the development of new Black and Asian writing in the '90s into the next millennium.

29 Jan - 2 Feb 2013 (Theatre Upstairs)
The Act, written & directed Thomas Hescott. Starring Matthew Baldwin. Examines the changing gay underground in the 1960s, after the Church of England's support for decriminalisation of homosexuality.

5 to 9 Feb 2013 (Theatre Upstairs)
Crimplene Millionaire , written & performed by Boogaloo Stu. Musical score by Angus Greenhalgh (AKA MC Cashback). Sometime celebrity knitwear designer, pop singer and cabaret artist Boogaloo Stu stages 1970s sub-culture as a giant interactive board game, setting the thriving artistic movements of the period against the backdrop of political upheaval.

12 to 16 Feb 2013 (Theatre Upstairs)
The Lady's Not For Walking Like An Egyptian , devised and performed by Rachel Mars and nat tarrab. Examines feminism and power in the 1980s by setting words from Margaret Thatcher's speeches to every top ten hit by a female pop artist.

19 to 23 Feb 2013 (Theatre Downstairs)
Love On Trial by Bilimankhwe Arts, directed by Roe Lane. Considers changing attitudes to homosexuality in the 1990s by contrasting illegal homosexuality in Malawi with George Michael's 1998 arrest for 'lewd conduct' in a public toilet.

26 Feb to 2 March 2013 (Theatre Downstairs)
Kinky by 2HeadedPigeon, directed by Clare Shucksmith. Examines the state of underground fetish culture in the UK today, and asks if politics is intervening too much in our right to a private life, no matter how extreme.

Other plays in the Spring season include...

29 Jan to 16 Feb 2013 (Theatre Downstairs )
Sour Lips by Omar El-Khairy, directed by Carissa Hope Lynch, produced with Paper Tiger. Following the story of Amina Arraf, the blogger known as A Gay Girl In Damascus and the events surrounding the media's coverage of her kidnapping, Sour Lips fuses fantasy and non-fiction to create its own speculative narrative. Amina was walking near Fares Al-Khouri Street, Damascus, when three armed men seized her. According to an eyewitness, Amina was bustled into a red Dacia Logan with a bumper sticker of Basel Assad. The men are assumed to be members of the Ba'ath Party militia or one of the security services. Amina's present location is still unknown.

19 Feb to 9 March 2013 (Theatre Upstairs )
Freakoid written & performed by Emma Adams, directed by Sarah Applewhite. Somewhere out there in the future a woman called Emma and a sentient vacuum cleaner called Hooverdroid have fallen in love. This future-queer love affair brings joy, heartache, hard-drive overload and internment. Against all the odds a biobot-hoover-baby is born. It's an absolute scandal. Thank goodness all other evidence of Emma and Hooverdroid's love has been destroyed. Or has it? This one woman performance with music and filthy language considers eugenics, personhood, memory and the beauty of otherness alongside analogue nerdism, time travel and a plea for love and understanding between all in a LGBT-QWERTY world.

26 Feb to 2 March 2013 (Third Space - Cafe )
Your Place or Mine? written & performed by Tim Redfern & David Sheppeard. On the Turing archive and the emotional value of memory.