The Dreadful Hours combines Tmesis Theatre’s Yorgos Karamalegos and Elinor Randle and their trademark physicality with new writing from acclaimed Northwest playwright Chris Fittock, in a darkly comic drama that explores the quiet crumbling of love’s first flourish through the lifetime of one couple’s relationship. Peepolykus’s master of the ridiculous Javier Marzan directs a wonderfully inventive production full of dark humour and striking visuals.

Tmesis Promotional Video

Following a series of workshops with local writers in 2007, Tmesis Theatre worked with writer Chris Fittock for two weeks on a short piece, which experimented with different styles of text and movement. The piece was presented at the Liverpool Everyman’s Everyword festival in July 2008 and proved to be a fantastic opportunity for the company to present a successful outcome of the experiment. The collaboration with Chris Fittock was particularly successful, and something they wanted to pursue. They found a very interesting way of working and of combining physical skills and text in a piece based on time and space which experimented with language, sound and physicality in the form of a ‘dreadful’ dinner between an ordinary couple.

Energised, ambitious, and intoxicated with a perfect summer of technicolour love, they feel extraordinary and long to have the world at their feet. But what happens when the summer ends, and the realities of suburban malaise begin to stifle the first sparks of limitless love? When an hour’s dinner can seem like years, yet years seem to pass in a heartbeat? This is the silent scream and the guttural roar of aspirational love fragmented by life.

Tmesis Theatre’s fourth production follows successful European tours of Tmesis, Memento Mori, and Anima, their trilogy on life’s journey. The Dreadful Hours is the first piece in which the company works with a writer.

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