I suspect Happy Now? might be all about me. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
If you are any where near Bristol over the weekend pop into the Arnolfini to see the premiere of Nightfall, the new piece from The Special Guests. I'm familiar with site specific and durational performances, but I think this is the first time I've come across one that's time specific. Examining the twilight hour as day slips into night, Nightfall will begin at 4.40pm, precisely 11 minutes before sunset. The show is going out on tour and will always be performed at sunset, so by the time it reaches Manchester at the end of May the starting time will be 9pm.
Having followed its development since the summer, I wasn't surprised that Brian Logan liked Gecko's The Arab and the Jew so much. I hope to pop in and take another look during the coming week to see the finished show, although of course in the case of Gecko there is really no such thing as a finished piece. Stan's Café are also continuing to develop their performance-cum-installation piece Of All the People in All the World which uses grains of rice to bring abstract statistics to life. Playing at the Exchange in Penzance and subsequently at Truro Cathedral, this is the small version of the show with 1,000kg of rice representing 60 million people. In Stuttgart the company needed 104 tons of rice to represent the entire world population.
If my time were entirely my own on Thursday, I would head down to the bar at Toynbee Studios where David Gale's Peachy Coochy Nite is taking place. In a series of presentations lasting precisely six minutes and 40 seconds, six people will compose verbal responses to 20 images of their choice. Sounds pretty peachy. Third Angel - whose Presumption was so terrific - have a new show at the Sheffield Crucible which asks why we trust technology when we don't know how it works. I'm frantically shuffling my diary in the hope I can get to see it because it only runs until Feb 9. I'm also keen to catch up with Lucinda Coxon's new play at the National, Happy Now?, because, like a great many women, I suspect that it might be all about me. I think I'll probably pass on The Vertical Hour. There are some plays that you feel you've seen when you've read the reviews.
On the other hand there are plays that you feel you've completely misjudged. I'm sure I did that when I saw Dennis Kelly's After the End in Edinburgh a couple of years back. I think I was blinded by the Collector-style scenario into thinking it was a shallow thriller. But deeper currents run through this examination of what acts of terrorism do to our personal relationships. Prime Cut are reviving it at the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast. Elsewhere, Angel House, the new one from Roy Williams, begins a national tour at the New Wolsey in Ipswich on Friday, Shared Experience are reviving their mid-90s National Theatre version of War and Peace and at the Manchester Royal Exchange you can see Arnold Wesker's Roots.
Emma Rice's last show at the National, A Matter of Life and Death, reimagined one iconic 1940s movie, and now she's attempting to do the same for another. Kneehigh's Brief Encounter plays in a cinema in the Haymarket from early next month. David Pugh is the commercial producer behind the show and I reckon he might have a hit on his hands, if venue and show really come together.
