The Story Of Tea, The Basement, Brighton, February 7 and 8 As it celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, Brighton’s Prodigal Theatre is going back to its roots. Through a range of special events, it will pay tribute to those who have helped make the company what it is today The series begins with two performances from Serbia’s Dah Teatar, whose work inspired Alister Loughlin and Miranda Henderson to found Prodigal, based at the Nightingale Theatre in Surrey Street.

Alister had previously spent four years training in drama in the UK but it was his time working with the experimental performance group that had the greatest impact on shaping his approach to theatre. In particular, their idea that audiences should be allowed to become “creative in the art of witnessing”.

“It’s like the way Picasso painted,” he explains. “If you have your religious Old Masters, you know the story you are being told. If you look at avant garde artists such as Jackson Pollock, you are looking at the story of the form and the reaction against linear storytelling. Then there’s this third way Picasso took. A Picasso painting could be a woman in a chair, a woman being hugged, two women even – and how you see it is the direction as to what it is you’re looking at. There’s this idea you bring your own resonance to the action in front of you.”

He spent two years training with Dar Teatar in Belgrade, between 1997 and 1999, when Nato’s bombing of the city forced him to return home, “One of the reasons we are called Prodigal”.

“Our company was born from the fact Dar Teatar was fragmented by the bombing,” he explains, “It wasn’t an immediate continuation, but what we later brought into the workroom was almost 100% Dar Teatar.”

Alister is delighted now to be bringing the company to the UK for the first time since 1998. Using The Basement’s larger performance space, they will be staging The Story Of Tea, their “version” of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Dealing with “trains of missing people, lost languages and missing truths,” the performance incorporates dance and vocal and instrumental music, although it is, Alister insists, “still very much theatre”.

The first piece they have made based on an existing play, it explores the meaning of memory in relation to truth. “In The Balkans now there is an aversion to looking at the real history and looking at truths. But Das Teatar explode the myths in ways you would not expect.”

The performances will be followed by workshops where local performers and writers will work with the company to produce new work. Prodigal Theatre will also collaborate with Dar Teatar on a new piece, to be presented next year.

Their programme for the forth-coming Brighton Festival and Fringe in May will see Prodigal unveil further events in their tenth anniversary celebration series.

  • 7.30pm, £10/£8, 01273 699733