Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Wed 31 July-Sat 3 Aug
Following the success of Muscle and last year’s Love At First Light, award-winning writer and director Greg Cullen has conjured up another evocative theatrical delight. Described by Greg as “magic realism”, Fallen is a tantalising mixture of desire, perversity, mystery and sin.
A farmer and his three adult children live in a remote Welsh farmhouse that is built from the stone of a castle ruin. Inspired by a Builth Wells legend, Greg explains that “somehow the relationships of the farmer and the three children are perverse and destructive and perhaps it’s because they have been infected by the blood, history and horror of this stone.”
The family slides into a greater fusion of peculiarities when a man falls from the sky. Finding him washed up in the river, they are allured and transformed by the beauty of the corpse. “He comes to represent different things to each person in the family,” adds Greg. “Each person projects onto this man what they need in their own lives. They project onto him their own sins.” As if all this idiosyncrasy isn’t captivating enough, who is the man in the green Barbour coat that comes looking for the corpse?
Greg predicts that “the audience will find it very funny at times; sometimes it gets farcical. They’ll also find it very moving and undoubtedly controversial,” but perhaps most intriguingly, he says “I don’t want the audience to ever see the corpse’s face.” Tickets: £8-£12. Info: 029 2030 4400 / www.chapter.org (HR)