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NOW 18 | Week 4

06 February — 10 February

Nick Cassenbaum

My Kind of Michael

Directed by Danny Braverman

The gregarious and disarming Nick Cassenbaum is a theatre maker and storyteller and there’s a certain celebrity from whom he’s learnt a lot… Ever since he was a kid, Michael Barrymore has been his hero.

Adored by audiences, he was once the king of British television. Nick believes that Barrymore was Britain’s best entertainer and he’s ready to convince you of that too.  

Using playful techniques plucked from Michael Barrymore’s own oeuvre, Nick will explore the major moments of the life of a cultural icon.

Following the smash-hit tour of his show Bubble Schmeisis (★★★★ “generous and poignant” The Stage), My Kind of Michael is full of hilarity and generosity as Nick recounts coming of age in awe of Barrymore.

Supported by The Yard Theatre,  Arts Council England and Battersea Arts Centre.

Rachel Mars

Your Sexts Are Shit

“You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.” James Joyce, letter to Nora Barnacle, 1908
Before sexts there were hand-written letters. And loads of them were proper filthy. Rachel Mars, whose ★★★★ “hilarious’ and ‘spiky” Our Carnal Hearts (The Guardian) sold out across the country, has gone in search search of sex and love letters. With the help of the internet, friends and two sexologists, she has unearthed missives dating back centuries.
Come and witness a night of some of the most shocking, tender, and hilarious sex letters from dead people including Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe and Mozart, as well as sexts sent in by anonymous donation.

“Congratulations on your penis.” Sext, 2017

Supported by The Yard Theatre, first piloted at Camden People’s Theatre

ACCESS

Access tickets are priced at £17 and can be booked online. We offer free tickets for companions and these must be booked over the phone (020 3111 0570) or by emailing lara@theyardtheatre.co.uk

About the Artists

Nick Cassenbaum

Since starting to work within theatre Nick has always focused on the way we interact with places and spaces and what that can tell us about ourselves. He aims to do this in a variety of ways. He disrupts our use of it with street theatre, having old ladies fall in love with you or almost been beaten up several times, he is now an old hat at performing just about anywhere. With his other company take stock exchange he collects stories from several community groups in an area and then shares the stories to highlight how different people can relate through the use of a space with a goal to increase empathy.

Bored by conventional theatre audiences, Nick has worked with just about any community group you can think of. His goal is to empower them to creatively engage with themselves and the place they live to help them realise that their story is amazing and no one else can do it justice but them.

He has made work for the Soho theatre, Royal Court and Battersea arts centre.

nickcassenbaum.com

Rachel Mars

Rachel is a performer and writer. Her work interrogates the idiosyncratic cultural and political constructs that inform the way we operate together. Her latest projects have seen her tackle the uses and abuses of humour, invite young girls to smash her dad’s reject pottery to bits with hammers and create pop-up choirs to sing songs about envy.

Her recent solo and collaborative shows Our Carnal Hearts, The Way You Tell Them, and The Lady’s Not For Walking Like an Egyptian have toured the UK and visited the US, Canada and Australia.

Rachel collaborates with a range of artists including Greg Wohead (Story #1) and nat tarrab as mars.tarrab – the 2017 Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award Winners.

In the past couple of years she made work with the support of The Royal Court, Ovalhouse, Fuel Theatre, The Wellcome Trust, Cambridge Junction, Playwright’s Workshop (Montreal) Asylum Residency and The Orchard Project (NY). She is an Artist Fellow at Birkbeck University. She regularly features on BBC Radio’s ‘Pause for Thought’, where she pretends to know things about faith.

rachelmars.org