Lights go on... lights go off... lights go on... lights go off... Contemporary life hums, buzzes, whirrs and recharges with electricity that we take for granted. It's always there - coming out of our wall sockets, stored in our batteries and flowing around us in cable after cable, concealed in every wall and under every floor.
BOiLEROOM is a theatre company with a fantastically eclectic line-up, bizarrely well-suited for the kind of stories and ideas they bring to the stage: theatre practitioners, a live sound artist, a sculptor, a surgeon and a physicist seem the perfect bunch for a non-typical performance about the dawn of the electrical age. The Terrific Electric is the company's first professional production but as they have already won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, we imagine they know what they're doing and do it well.
An isolated household falls under the spell of a charismatic man of science who takes up residence to pursue his experiments. Through this surreal and fantastical world of innovation, BOiLEROOM investigates technology and our relationship with it across generations, from utopian visions of the future to mobile phones, cyberspace and the cutting edge of mechanised medicine.
From what we've read about this intriguing little number, there will be film, music, experimental sound, bits of traditional theatre and stuff that doesn't fall into any of those categories, which are often the most exciting bits. We're expecting to reviews ranging from the smug, one-word 'electrifying' to variations of 'shocking', 'fully-charged' and 'about 40 watts.'
The Terrific Electric at the Barbican Pit, Tuesday 4 to Saturday 15 September. For more information and to book tickets, go to the Barbican website here.
Image courtesy of hojusaram's Flickr photostream, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.
