Chris Goode’s new solo storytelling show is a sad and strange fairytale for adults about what happens when you refuse to accept that you’re lost. Mirabel is tender, hallucinatory and disturbing story that follows a lone child through a desolate landscape after the end of the world, conjured by Chris’s distinctive lyrical style with a richly immersive visual and sound design. Combining the bedtime-story charm of his The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley with the harsh and uncompromising edge of Men in the Cities, Mirabel is a fable about present day anxieties surrounding climate breakdown and the politics of nihilism.
Mirabel follows the eponymous eight-year-old as she and her old faithful Bear search for a responsible adult to take care of her in the alien post-apocalyptic world in which she has woken up alone. Along the way she accumulates a travelling gang of outsiders: an enigmatic stray dog, a badly wounded pilot, a bluebell and a talking rock, all of whom accompany her on her quest through the devastated landscape. But as they reach their apparent destination, the story spins into an entirely different and unexpected final act.
Chris Goode said: “I am thrilled to be working again with Ovalhouse, who have been such good friends to us over the past decade, and to be collaborating on this show with a remarkable cohort of creative friends. Every time I make a solo show I swear I’ll never put myself through it again. But this very personal story, in all its strangeness, its anger and its compassion, proved impossible to resist.”
Mirabel is at Ovalhouse 31st October to 18th November 2018.
