Photos: First Look At Dickie Beau In ¡SHOWMANISM! At the Ustinov Studio in Bath

The final commission by Deborah Warner in her inaugural season as Artistic Director of Ustinov Studio is ¡SHOWMANISM! A Concise Histrionic of Performance, devised and performed by Dickie Beau at the Ustinov Studio in Bath, 11 November to 10 December 2022.

A Transubstantial Pageant where Jacques Lacan meets acid drag.

Actor Nathan Lane says of Dickie Beau: "The bottom line is he's an extraordinary artist and a brilliant actor, and whenever he steps onto a stage something amazing happens"

Spend an evening in the company of stage and screen legends - Ian McKellen, Peter Sellars (renowned theatre director, not the actor!), Fiona Shaw and many more - as you have certainly never seen or heard them before. Channelling actors, lecturers, journalists, impressionists, and other enchanting voices from the shadowlands of performance, the uniquely talented Dickie Beau guides us on an off-road journey through Theatre and its history.

Dickie cuts up and then "re-members" this compelling collection of voices to trace a path through the world of performance itself in all its permutations, from Greek Theatre to nightclub drag queens; from politics to puppetry.

¡SHOWMANISM! will be a surprising and inspiring journey through the origins and orientations of showing off, created from interview footage that Dickie has personally collected through conversations with his subjects over many months. Here, he "plays back" those conversations through his own body in a surreal theatre trip that promises to be by turns hilarious and haunting.

A live lip-syncing phenomenon, Dickie Beau dazzled Ustinov audiences this summer as the mercurial Ariel in Deborah Warner's highly acclaimed The Tempest. Now he delivers a live audio-visual treat which talks to us about art, about the world and about being human.

Photo Credit: Sarah Ainslie