The world premiere of Dancing To Disco opens at the award-winning theatre The Space on Tuesday 24th August 2021 for a limited 6 performances, playing until 28th August 2021. A Live-stream will be available on 27th August 2021 at 7:30pm.
Developed over two years, following the personal conversations between writer Nick Dawkins and actor Tom Claxton about growing up, being working class and the UK education system, Dancing To Disco is a tender-hearted, darkly-witty and hopeful coming-of-age solo show.
The story centres around the character of Tommy, a working-class Mancunian lad during a confrontational 24 hours, caught between family and background and an opportunity to change his circumstances… Oxford University. What happens when this opportunity presents itself, but everything about it doesn’t feel made for you?
Intertwined with disco music, one actor takes the audience through a journey of class, conflict and identity in monologue, character performance and dancing in his underwear to Donna Summer.
Director Charlie Norburn said: “We’re in a political climate where the existence of private schools and academic inequality are now actually seriously being called into question. We’re driven to create a project about privilege, education and opportunity, and ‘Dancing to Disco’ takes these ideas and puts them under a lens of this central character and his experience.”
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…“As much as being about education and privilege it’s also a play about disco and fun and family and that feeling you have when you are at the age that Tommy is, where you can take on the world and be anything you want to be… and now theatres and eventually bars, clubs, raves and discos and all of these spaces of communion that are really important to people start to open up again, what better time to celebrate that?
Actor Tom Claxton said: “It’s a play that’s incredibly close to my own heart, growing up in a working class background, going to state school and having to rely on scholarships and other sorts of funding in order to be able to go to higher education in the first place. [I] think it’s really important to have those kinds of working class stories put on stage so that people from similar backgrounds can see and hopefully feel inspired, or feel that there’s a piece of work connecting to them.
Dancing To Disco is at The Space 24th to 28th August 2021. Tickets are on sale here.
