WOS Heads to This Weekend’s Latitude Festival

The genre-defying Latitude Festival kicks off today (16 July 2009) in Suffolk, serving up four days of music, theatre, comedy, dance, poetry and everything in between. And this year, Whatsonstage.com will be there, running a live blog featuring reviews, news, photos, gossip and interviews, as well as regular Twitter updates.

Latitude has been running annually at Henham Park Estate near Southwold in Suffolk since 2006, and was awarded Special Achievement in Regional Theatre at last year’s TMA Awards (See News, 26 Oct 2008).

This year’s theatre highlights include a post-Young Vic and pre-Edinburgh outing for Che Walker’s musical Been So Long, and the premiere of Theatre503’s Urban Sprawl, featuring four plays (including one by Mark Ravenhill) from its recent podcast Urban Scrawl project.

The Bush Theatre returns following its success last year with Latitude co-commission 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, premiering a new piece inspired by audience submissions and written by a team of up-and-coming playwrights – Sudden Loss of Dignity – which opens in London next month.

And the Royal Shakespeare Company – which last year caused a stir with a zombie piece written and directed by Anthony Neilson – returns this summer with Here Lies Mary Spindler, dealing with the subject of 17th century witchcraft paranoia. Created by director Elizabeth Freestone, RSC movement director Struan Leslie, playwright Phil Porter and the Suffolk Trial Society, it runs at the ‘witching hour’ on Saturday 18 July and at dusk on Sunday 19 July.

Other highlights in the theatre arena will include: Paines Plough’s new collaborative piece Traces, choreographed by Georgina Lamb; Joel Horwood’s “stand-up tragedy” Is Everyone Okay? for nabokov; the National Theatre’s production of Lucinda Coxon’s latest comedy, The Eternal Not; and the Pleasance Theatre’s “Picks” preview of three shows from its August programme at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Whatsonstage.com deputy editor Theo Bosanquet is donning his wellies and heading up for the weekend, alongside  Off-West End deputy editor Jo Caird. Together they’ll be covering as much of the theatre side of things as is humanly possible, so be sure to bookmark their live blog and follow us on Twitter to get your Latitude fix!