Edinburgh Fringe award winners play mac in March.
Untied Artists, led by Jo Carr and Jake Oldershaw, have been making theatre in the West Midlands since 1997. For Their Own Good is the second of their productions supported by mac birmingham and is performed in mac’s theatre on Thursday 6th March. This thought-provoking work, which toured Edinburgh Fringe 2013 as part of the prestigious British Council Showcase, gained a much sought after Fringe First Award, and is a must see addition to mac birmingham’s Exit Strategy programme at the beginning of a national tour.
Two knackermen, a horse, a gun and a tiny metropolis full of death. Can the way we kill animals teach us anything about our own demise? For Their Own Good explores this subject matter in an innovative and powerful way.
Accompanied by some exquisitely crafted puppets, including a life-size horse, Tom and his new apprentice Scott investigate the pitfalls of being high up the evolutionary chain. While Tom tries to teach Scott the Creed of the Knackerman, and the ethics of killing, his own life starts to unravel. He begins to wonder if someone will approach his eventual death with the same care and attention that the beasts receive on entering his yard.
For Their Own Good is eclectic in style, taking source material from interviews and documentary footage of veterinary surgeries, farms, abattoirs, hospitals and homes. It tells a moving and comic tale about the only certainty in life; death, how it’s become removed from us as a process, and how maybe we should reclaim it.
For Their Own Good also featured in London’s Suspense puppet festival last year to a host of great reviews: “On a Fringe full of shows about death and bereavement, and our inadequate ways of dealing with them, you won’t find any more original – in inspiration, in setting, in tone…A rich, complex, disturbing show about men who know how to kill, and about how compassion has many faces, not all of them soft and smiling…opens up a moral universe of uncertainty, into which this bold show steps, with a rare energy and power.” Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman.
