Trap Street & Dinomania: Two Plays by Kandinsky

Dinomania

★★★★★ ‘Wildly inventive theatre company Kandinsky return with a head-spinningly smart show about Victorian fossil hunters…No-one else makes theatre quite like this.’ Time Out

Dinomania was originally commissioned by New Diorama Theatre, running from 19 February to 23 March 2019.

165 million years ago, an iguanodon is killed in the heart of a rainforest. Time passes, the rainforest becomes the South Downs, and every part of the iguanodon degrades and disappears – except one tooth.

197 years ago, in safe, affluent 1820s Sussex, a country doctor finds the tooth. But where does it fit in the story of an earth created by God just 6,000 years ago?

★★★★ Evening Standard

★★★★ ‘Consistently smart and inventive.’ The Stage

★★★★ ‘Brilliant comic timing… I have rarely seen such an electric cast’ A Younger Theatre

‘This is such intelligent work from a seriously talented company’ – Lyn Gardner for Stagedoor

‘Sharply funny and exciting throughout’ – The TLS

‘For Kandinsky, this is yet another nuanced, reflective, and highly creative approach to theatre-making. Original and perceptive, this is storytelling at its best.’ – Exeunt

Trap Street

★★★★ ‘Trap Street is an 80-minute show that melds an astonishing complexity of themes, a mastery of form and a deep, deep humanity … another triumph for Kandinsky’ Time Out

This show premiered at New Diorama Theatre, running from 6 to 31 March 2018. It also ran at the Schaubühne, Berlin from 5 to 7 April 2019 as part of the Festival of International New Drama (FIND) where the New York Times described it as:

‘not only the highlight of the festival but one of the most ingenious pieces of new theater I have seen recently… The three-person cast deftly shifts between time periods in a mesmerizing single act that combines minimal stagecraft, improvised music and finely chiseled performances to create an anguished cry of moral outrage about neoliberal economic policies, gentrification and the erosion of the social security system.’

It’s 1961 and the concrete’s just been poured for a brand new housing estate. It’s beautiful, not because of the clean lines, indoor toilets and wide windows, but because the idea behind it is beautiful. This is the future, and it’s for everyone.

It’s 2018 and the last tower of the estate is about to come down. The dream that saw it built has long since died and now the estate has to follow suit to make way for new buildings, based on new ideas. This is the future, whether you like it or not.

★★★★ ‘Timely critique about the housing crisis is both angry and humane.’ Evening Standard

★★★★ ‘Compelling and intelligent’ The Stage

‘ferociously intelligent, poignant … Trap Street effectively maps the process of British dreaming, and how that process is permanently written into the landscape itself.’ Exeunt

Kandinsky brings the company’s trademark theatrical inventiveness to city life, exploring a community trying to find its way in a landscape shaped by power. TRAP STREET charts 50 years of changing attitudes to ownership and space in London, to ask what home means in 2018.

© 2021 Salamander Street Ltd. (E-bog): 9781913630119

Release date

E-bog: 25. februar 2021