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 Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols

Dickie’s first solo theatre show premiered at Homotopia Festival in 2011, and has toured many venues around the UK, with successful runs at Soho Theatre, Chelsea Theatre, Bristol Old Vic for Mayfest, Brighton Dome, Contact Manchester, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Cambridge Junction. This celebrated solo work conjures the spirits of Hollywood icons in an innovative theatre experience. Dickie leads audiences on a bewitching adventure as he channels the ghosts of his childhood idols.

In creating Blackouts Dickie secured exclusive access to audio tapes of Marilyn Monroe’s final interview conducted by journalist Richard Meryman. Published in LIFE magazine just two days before her death, Blackouts includes material never before heard in the public domain.  As well as this rare audio footage, segments creatively appropriated from Dickie’s own recordings with Richard Meryman also form the backbone of the story. Blackouts sees Dickie shape-shift through a shadowy soundscape of lost souls in a sensational trip to the subconscious underworld of his future self; bringing to life these audio artefacts.

The show marks a significant development for Dickie’s trademark process of dissecting, then re-membering (literally, putting back together and embodying), found sound. The digital script was written entirely using found sound and incorporates much original source material, including the spellbinding Judy Speaks tapes – Judy Garland alone with a Dictaphone, making notes for a memoir never to be written. The resulting piece is a study of icons in exile – from society and themselves – and the haunting impressions they’ve left behind.

Directed by Jan willem van den Bosch

Lighting design by Martin Langthorne

Arts Council Grants for the Arts Logo

“Exploiting bravura lighting and projection effects, the results are funny, compelling and deeply moving, with an uncanny quality that stems from Beau’s white-face mask of make-up, the emotional power of the words he selects and the technical precision of his lip synching … ”
Time Out
“Dickie Beau is the closest this country has to a genuine medium, an auteur of the airwaves, who can put flesh onto recorded sound in a manner both gripping and disturbing.”
This is Cabaret
“A queerly postmodern Krapp’s Last Tape . . . the queer idol worship of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland explored in ways of which Samuel Beckett would no doubt have been proud.”
Total Theatre Review
“Touching, bizarre and visually gorgeous . . . a thing unlike any other . . . it is the drag show at the end of the world.”
Time Out

 

Blackouts

 

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