Media City-based, twice award-winning theatre company, Footlights, are touring the North West in January with AND THEN YOU KISSED ME, a hard-hitting play using verbatim accounts from victims and perpetrators of domestic violence and the authorities who deal with the day to day realities.
The play, which follows the sell-out success of The Queen Is Dead, at The Lowry in 2014, will tour to The Met, Bury on Tuesday 12 January, The Lowry Studio on Wednesday 13 & Thursday 14 January and The Citadel, St Helens on Friday 15 January. There will also be a flash mob performance at Manchester Piccadilly Station on Monday 11 January, where the cast will perform impactful extracts from the play during the evening rush hour.
Having worked with verbatim theatre pioneer Max Stafford Clark, and taking inspiration from Robin Soans’ A State Affair, director and creator Jo Fisher has interviewed a range of people about their experiences and tells often graphic, harrowing accounts with huge sensitivity. The result is a play which is educational, grass-roots and sometimes surprisingly humorous. Audiences should expect to leave the theatre feeling empowered and informed and certainly more able to recognise the often hidden signs of domestic violence in others or even in themselves.
“We hope to make people more aware of the triggers and the consequences of domestic violence through the voices of those most closely affected by it” Jo explains. “This is a subject that we’re often unaware of until situations become untenable. Even then, the authorities are not always set up to deal with the victims or the perpetrators.”
The play is not the end of the process for Footlights. It is the beginning of a campaign that hopes, through the arts, to open up the subject of domestic violence, in all its many forms, and to get people talking.
