Lullaby
From: Friday, 24th June 2011
To: Sunday, 24 July 2011
Our Review: 
Your Reviews:
Search for tickets
Use the link below to search for Lullaby tickets on your desired date.
We're sorry, it seems that we do not currently sell tickets for this show. Please go directly to the box office.
| Tweet |
|
Synopsis
A sleepover cabaret. Arrive with your pyjamas and toothbrush, get tucked up in bed and spend the night in a large, theatrical dormitory.
Our Review:
Terri Paddock - 29 June 2011
As a frequent insomniac, a show that promised “sublime” slumber was impossible to resist. Still, I entered the Barbican full of scepticism. Given how much trouble I have falling (and staying) asleep in the security of my own home, I didn’t hold out much hope for doing so on my first sleepover party since the age of 16, held in the subterranean Pit with 50 strangers.
But Lullaby, Duckie’s new, totally immersive theatre experience is designed to soothe and comfort from start to finish. On arrival at 10.30pm, you check yourself and your bags in and are then escorted by pyjama-clad stewards from changing rooms to toilets to your surprisingly comfortable and beautifully dressed (by Toast) bed. Once all audience members are tucked in to their singles, doubles or triple, the winding of music boxes signals the start of the performance.
It’s all gentle stuff – choral singing, light shows, a troupe of octopi with glittering...
Latest User Review
David Trennery - 29 June 2011:
There is nothing cosy about the 21st century: 24 hour tweets, texts and TV make it a marvel anyone gets any sleep, let alone the seven hours of slow wave slumber promised by the blurb for Duckie’s Lullaby in the Barbican’s Pit Theatre until 24th July. Designer Laura Hopkins has transformed the Pit into a giant circular bedroom: audiences arrive for cookies and cocoa at 10.30 before heading to bed (your choice of single, double or what looked a triple berth) in time for an 11pm start to what can only be described as a sleepover show. The first half (there is a short break for the cleaning of teeth) sees a succession of giant cotton wool characters come and go in a carousel of surreal song and dance: the highlight is a chorus of octopi offering an open invitation into their underwater world. Interspersed into the procession of childhood dream figures are ballads and storytelling, whimsical episodes echoing the meandering looping thoughts of a mind unravelling on the edge of sleep. In the second section the scope of the piece spills out into the solar system through a polyphonic blend of chants and sketches by which the human nervous system is linked to Pythgoras’ ancient model of the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres. It is all much simpler than I am making it sound and the overall effect is immensely benign. There is an inexpressible comfort in drifting away in a strange sort of intimacy with a room full of strangers. The last thing I can remember is the return of the cotton wool caricatures, more formless than before, but welcome as old friends are when encountered unexpectedly. The morning brings a dawn ‘chorus’ which it would be churlish to spoil by explaining and, over coffee and croissants, real life resumes: tired staff still in their pyjamas guide you out of the Barbican and back into 2011. Duckie’s Lullaby will not be everybody’s cup of cocoa: the Pit is pretty infernal on these hot nights, it only takes one snorer and I don’t advise going on a school night but, if you secretly yearn for feather pillows and spiced possets, then book yourself a bed in director Mark Whitelaw’s wonderfully gentle world....
Creative
Harriet Plewis (Author)
Matthew Robins (Author)
Tim Spooner (Author)
Duckie (Producer)
Barbican (Producer)
Mark Whitelaw (Director)
Laura Hopkins (Design)
Information
|
