Ragnarok, the much anticipated new production from multi-award winning theatre company Tortoise in a Nutshell and Figurteatret i Nordland, in association with Macrobert Arts Centre, comes to audiences across Scotland in February and March 2024. A World Premiere at Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre will be followed by an Edinburgh Premiere as part of the 17th edition of Manipulate Festival, before Ragnarok embarks on a nationwide tour.
A golden age is ending.
There have been three years of winter.
The sun hangs low in the sky, unmoving, and the bonds of kinship are failing.
Ragnarok follows a young girl and her brother as they battle to find a promised land. Two souls in a sea of thousands, they move through a fractured world as both dream and reality crumble around them. A collision of ancient myth and modern spectacle, Ragnarok takes inspiration from Norse mythology’s cyclical tale of the same name to explore the most pressing issues of our time.
After a critically-acclaimed, sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Concerned Others, multi-award winning Tortoise in a Nutshell return with a brand-new production that fuses together forms. A miniature world of cities, mountains and valleys is populated by hundreds of hand-crafted clay figures, brought to life through live feed camera work, recorded voices and an atmospheric immersive soundtrack; posing vital questions about the human condition.
A bold and multisensory theatrical work, Ragnarok explores our perspectives on global crises, asking us to consider immediacy and our temptation for nihilism versus the innate human ability for hopefulness and will to survive. It is a story of fate and self-determination, mortals and gods, the world’s end and its rebirth.
Ragnarok tours to Stirling, Edinburgh, Greenock, St Andrews, Inverness, Cumbernauld, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, with further venues TBC From 3 February – 28 March 2024. Directed and designed by Tortoise in a Nutshell co-director Alex Bird and Arran Howie with composition and music performance from longtime TIAN collaborator Jim Harbourne.
