Clod Ensemble Presents THE RED CHAIR At Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Sept 2015

Winner of an Argus Angel at Brighton Festival 2015, Sarah Cameron's towering solo performance is a delicious feast for the imagination performed in luscious Scottish dialect and served with tasty morsels and a musical score that rolls in like the mist off the mountains.

Drawing on a rich tradition of Scottish myth and folktales, The Red Chair tells the darkly humourous tale of a man who cannot stop eating, the woman doomed to cook his meals, and their one 'inveesible child'. At three points in the show, audiences are invited to try tasty nibbles and a dram of whisky to oil the way.
Created in collaboration with artist Sarah Cameron and based on her original book, The Red Chair is performed with the physical vitality that has become a trademark of Clod Ensemble's work. Woven into the production is an original sound score, combining sampled bagpipes and string quartet, created by Clod Ensemble co-artistic director Paul Clark.

Sarah Cameron is an artist, performer and writer. Raised in Dundee, she studied sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art and theatre at Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Young Vic, where she was a member of the resident company that created the legendary production of Grimm Tales, directed by Tim Supple.

She first worked with Clod Ensemble in 1999, and then toured their production of Greed internationally in 2003. Most recently she appeared in their production of Zero at Sadler's Wells Theatre.

Director Suzy Willson said "When Sarah first showed us her book we were blown away both by the quality of the language and by the power of the central image of a father who turns into the chair he is sitting upon. It is both mythic and contemporary, funny and heartfelt. It speaks of family and of ancestry - all the while conjuring up the wild beauty of the Scottish landscape. Sarah is also a sculptor and the story felt to us like a kind of sculpture of words and we immediately wanted to hear and see her telling it."

Since its inception in 1995, Clod Ensemble has made work in a wide range of media including performance, dance, music, visual art, photography, film and poetry. Clod Ensemble takes work to theatre spaces, festivals and galleries as well as creating projects and curating events in places where art does not usually or regularly happen including medical schools, day care centres and prisons.

The Red Chair runs at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Thursday 17 to Saturday 19 September 2015.

"If Wes Anderson were to turn his hand to epic poetry he would have produced something like this. But Sarah Cameron has got there already with her fantasmagorical, exuberant, bumptious, naughty and deliciously surreal tale of laziness, gluttony, dereliction of parental duty and, in the end, love." Argus Angel Winner - Brighton Festival 2015

"Never before have I seen a performer embody words in quite the way that Sarah Cameron does... this rich story of indulgence, neglect and recompense is seasoned to perfection" Exeunt

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