Stage Struck

The promenade's the thing, writes PETER CRAWLEY

Some plays are so involving, layered, and full of inexhaustible detail that it seems possible to climb inside them and live there for a while. How about wandering the whispering halls and bawling chambers of Elsinore, where you could offer Hamlet some much-

needed counselling, eavesdrop on ghostly commands and avoid lingering too long behind the arras? Or maybe you'd like to hit downtown Thebes and tag along with Oedipus as he solves riddles, pshaws oracles and gets to know his mother a little better? The reason I ask is because the entrancing British company dreamthinkspeak have stolen this year's Brighton Festival with a promenade performance piece based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Stretching the ill-fated Ranevskaya estate across the countless rooms and several storeys of an abandoned Co-op building, it leads you through a fantastically transformed department store – often leaving you free to wander its expansive shop floors and crepuscular stairwells to make your own discoveries.

First met by Firs – the doddery butler who is literally entombed in the estate in Chekhov’s original – you enter a blur of references inspired equally by the play and the space. It’s as though the threatened razing of the cherry trees and the development of the estate has logically resulted in a palace of frozen food aisles and kitchen appliances at unbeatable prices, where now the fantasy of consumerism seems just as ripe for the axe.

There are some extraordinary touches in the multi-layered installations, performance vignettes, video projections, miniature models, live interactions and explorable objects of director Tristan Sharps’s world. But it’s the sensory detail that makes the most impression. A waft of cherry blossom hangs in the air before you find yourself, with a haunting chill, roaming alone through the remains of the orchard.

In some respects you could say that this almost misses the point of the drama that inspired it, where characters, themes and meanings are established through dialogue and action. Before I Sleepinstead dwells on symbol: for all the expanse of the playing space, the show's substance is often shrunk to endlessly reiterated motifs and an emotional tone dictated by ambient sound loops, like a rich song rendered as a ringtone.

Promenade performances are firmly on the march. Last year, The Stomach Box’s award-

winning No Worst There Is Noneused its site-specific production to walk us through the mind of Gerard Manly Hopkins, while Anu Productions' Basintrailed fictions and movement across a park and into its gate lodge. Next month, Corcadorca transplants another Russian play – Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine– into a promenade through Cork's Savoy Theatre.

Knowing Chekhov's play helps in unlocking some of Sharps's gorgeously deployed secrets, but the production's success reveals that, no less than Harry Potteraficionados, when a theatre audience is familiar with a fiction, they relish the chance to inhabit its world. You've seen the play, now visit the theme park.