With 40 television monitors on stage, a team of multilingual interpreters and two hours of live rolling news coverage, anything could happen during Rimini Protokoll’s Breaking News.

The reality theatre production is making its English debut tonight, following more than 20 shows in Germany over the past three years.

“Rimini Protokoll don’t work with actors,” says show co-creator Sebastian Brunger.

“We always take a product, text or person as a starting point and invite people to develop it into a theatre production, who appear on stage with us. They talk about themselves and their jobs. They don’t learn anything by heart that they wouldn’t know already in their area of expertise.”

Previous productions have seen workers in Dusseldorf talk about what Karl Marx’s Das Capital means to them and a German politician discuss Friedrich Schiller’s poetry.

“We thought maybe we could take the daily news as a text,” says Sebastian. “We installed four satellite dishes in our rehearsal rooms and started watching the news.

“We realised we would have to have interpreters, otherwise we would only get a limited sense of what was going on. We invited people who were also experts – either presenters, editors, directors or cameramen – who could translate what was going on and comment on the pictures they were seeing.”

In the end, nine people were chosen to cover news across the globe including a central moderator who acts as a remote control moving between the different areas. This UK debut may also be augmented with a Brighton-based presenter.

As well as reporting the news, each interpreter tells the audience a little about their own lives, underlining their own sense of perspective.

Running throughout the evening is the story of the Battle Of Salamis during the Greco-Persian wars in 480 BC, what Sebastian describes as the first news drama in history.

But much of the show is about the different news angles seen during the evening.

“You see if everybody is covering the same things, treating them in a different way, or not even talking about them,” says Sebastian. “Russia always just talks about its own affairs.”

One performance in Hamburg coincided with the American elections where the audience saw the differing reactions in Russia, India and Cuba to Barack Obama’s win.

Another night took place over Easter. The Pope filled the airwaves in South American and European channels, but it was an ordinary day in Pakistan and India.

Sometimes the quiet nights are the best.

“You see the news agencies work to get something out there, whether it is interesting or not,” says Sebastian.

There have been some memorable occasions, such as a simultaneous broad- cast of a speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin on state and American TV.

“On Russian television, Putin is always this big statesman, his words are not commented upon,” says Sebastian. “American CNN was commenting on what he was saying and it was like being told a different story.”

Other incidents had been happy accidents.

“We took Iceland into the project because we thought it would be nice to have a comparison to the big world events,” says Sebastian. “Then Iceland became famous across the entire world because it was almost bankrupted.

“Simon [the interpreter] was covering the news story of the biggest demonstration in Iceland’s history. He had spoken to his mother that day, who was going to the demonstration because she was angry about the krona falling.

“Then, as he was doing the show, he saw his mother on television. It was a magical moment.”

  • 7.30pm, tickets from £5, call 01273 709709.