Queen Of The Slaughter

4:07pm Friday 25th May 2007

The curious title of this new production from Prodigal Theatre refers to a term coined by the newspapers in the Thirties, in the wake of the infamous trunk murders.

Alister O'Loughlin, who founded Prodigal with Miranda Henderson, and stars alongside her in Queen Of The Slaughter, explains: "A guy killed his wife, dismembered her and buried her in a trunk in a shallow grave in Lover's Lane.

Later, someone left a trunk at Victoria Station, in which was discovered a dancer who had been killed and dismembered, again in Brighton.

"Brighton was then dubbed Queen Of The Slaughtering Places."

The story pricked the pair's imagination. "We started thinking what is a slaughtering place? In every city there is a place where people have been killed, whether in public or private. Often these places are forgotten about."

Alister and Miranda took as their starting point the idea that the people in their story were gathering at a place such as this, a place of slaughter.

The play, which promises a beautiful and dynamic mix of dance, opera, piano, fencing, poetic text and parkour-based movement, is set in a "nebulous, non-specific area", but there is a sense the characters are near a battle, or a front-line of sorts.

An atmosphere of death hovers over the five-strong cast.

"The Queen of the Slaughter herself is a threatening and unpredictable presence.

You're not sure who she is but you know someone is going to get killed," says Alister.

Possibly the most overtly political piece of work Prodigal have done, the play explores war, ideology and fundamentalism. It is about an idealist who has a belief and a cause. He leaves his home to fight and arrives at the place of conflict where he meets four people, three of whom are delighted to see him and teach him everything he needs to know about how to achieve his goal. The other tries to warn him things are not what they seem.

"Eventually, they put a gun in his hand and encourage him to kill," says Alister. "The idealist is he's turned into an executioner and his ideology is perverted. It's not as simple as being brain-washed. There is a point when someone makes a choice to pick up a gun."

In the late Nineties, Alister and Miranda were living and working in Belgrade when it was bombed by NATO. They were forced to abandon their friends and return to the UK.

The experience, unsurprisingly, left an indelible mark on their work.

"Our friends were being bombed by the people we had voted for," says Alister.

"Eight years later, our country is going in to other people's countries and bombing, rather than finding peaceful solutions. We are trying to talk about that without being crass in the process.

"Queen of the Slaughter is one of our most sophisticated pieces of work. It is made to travel internationally. You don't need to understand the language and there are no answers. We are framing the question and looking at all the possible answers."

• Starts 4pm, tickets £5-£12.50.

Call 01273 647100

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