The Elves and the Shoemakers
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Highlights from the Factory's New Season

Bristol’s Tobacco Factory have announced their Autumn/Winter Season, which includes a sensational programme of theatre, puppetry, masked performance, comedy, Shakespeare, Opera and Family shows including two magical productions for Christmas.

Opening the season is the acclaimed Hit Me: The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury, which comes to Bristol direct from its second West End Season and explores the highs and lows of Ian Dury’s extraordinary career and inspirational life story. Next is Vamos Theatre’s full-mask theatre production Nursing Lives. Ex-Trestle Theatre members have come together to create a show alive with visual inventiveness, evocative music and song, physical theatre and 1940s dance sequences.

Returning to the Factory after previous sell-out performances, Action Hero bring back their wonderfully chaotic, sharp, and poignant performance of A Western, which went down a storm at last year’s Mayfest. Also, the dark and provocative Tinkerting perform their twisted piece Hunger and Filter arrive in Bristol back by popular demand to perform their fast-paced Twelfth Night.

Towards the end of September the Gare Saint Lazare Players present The Beckett Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable), a must for any serious theatre or literature lover. This remarkable tour-de-force comes to Bristol for the first time, having played every major theatrical capital in the Western World.

During Black History Month in October, Trestle presents Burn My Heart, a new stage adaptation based on the award-winning novel by Beverley Naidoo. This devastating and highly relevant story is set during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. <[> Opera Project present their annual opera in October. This year the acclaimed company presents Verdi’s powerful love story La Traviata.

In November, Northern Broadsides come to the Factory for the first time and presents 1984. George Orwell’s stark, uncompromising futuristic vision pulls no punches, resonating now more than ever. In a world of dodgy dossiers, rendition, torture, CCTV, Murdoch, spin and political corruption, truth has indeed become as strange as this chilling fiction.

Looking ahead to Christmas , the team behind 2008’s fantastic A Christmas Carol, return with a new production of The Adventures of Pinocchio for children aged 6 + and their families. For little ones, Bristol – based Pins and Needles presents The Elves and The Shoemakers, one of the most enchanting fairy stories ever told, in The Brewery. Other family shows on offer include Tall Stories’ Twinkle Twonkle and How The Koala Learnt To Hug.

The Tobacco Factory’s sister space, the Brewery Theatre, is now one year old, and has given the theatre extra capacity to develop and programme work and has been a hugely successful and beneficial addition for artists and audiences alike.

The Brewery programme continues to support a range of local and national performing artists who want the opportunity run a show for a few weeks. This autumn includes work from local writer Shaun McCarthy with his play Beanfield, award-winning Ensemble 52 with their searing drama As We Forgive Them, Andy Burden’s stripped down version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Fairground Theatre’s Bonnie and Clyde and Ministry of Entertainment’s Mrs Gerrish’s Rear Window.

- by Simon Cole

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