Outdoor theatre! Commedia dell'Arte! Physical theatre at its best!

The Rudes are on the road again this summer with our brand new play called Ik 'r' us Inc. We open at Redlands, Vines Cross, near Heathfield in East Sussex on Saturday 12th June and will be performing at most of our usual venues as well as a few new ones in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset. All performances are in the evening and will usually begin at 7.30 (but check the itinerary below for variations).

The Story

“It’s 1955 and life carries on just as it always has in Dreamville Indiana. The Eldridge Costello giant automobile assembly lines throb on like a choir of basses from Hell, while the kids hang out with their cars on the dusty ball park. With Halloween fast approaching, the lady members of the Dreamville Grand Teepee of Buffaloes, the Buffalesses, are making the biggest pumpkin pie you've ever seen. It's a county wide competition to find fun ways to feed the poor - and if anyone can rise to the challenge it's Janet Brewster, the wife of Earl Brewster IV, the Supreme Chief of the Dreamville teepee and mayor of the town. But the nefarious and sinister factory owner, Eldridge L. Costello, with the help of local gangster Jimmy 'Scarface' Pescatori, has other ideas.

Then a stranger walks into town - just walks in as if he owned the place, with his pasty-faced dreamer of a son. Begins banging on doors with his suitcase by his side. Calling out his mantra like some god forsaken preacher. "Your dreams are just a place! We'll take you there at Ik 'r' us Inc!" The kid hanging in the background. The local girls eyeing him up, just as if he were made of candy. "Flights of every kind! To the moon! To the stars! To your wildest dreams! Of fancy, of love, of hope, of ambition, of imagination, of passion, of stairs!" And sure enough, people come tumbling into the street, pouring out their goddamn hearts.

This latest play by The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company tells the story of Daedalus H. Gildersleeves, a travelling salesman who has progressed from selling vacuum cleaners to encyclopedias and finally to selling dreams. Rivalries are exposed, grievances and pain long-since veiled in repectability are revealed, and secret hopes laid bare as Daedalus begins to fly the Dreamville townsfolk up into the clear blue Indiana skies to their dreams.

The school swot, Sandra, and daughter of the mayor, finally looks up from her book, Bullfinch's 'Beauties of Mythology', long enough to notice and fall in love with Daedalus' pale faced visionary of a boy, Ikarus, and watches as his dream gets bigger and bigger until he is irrevocably drawn to the source of both life and death, the sun. Then Sandra notices on page 200 of her book a terrifying detail - and is thrown into panic and despair!

Hilarious, romantic, tender, searching - and laced with rock'n'roll.

The critics

Lyn Gardner - June 25 2008 - The Guardian - on Noah Babel's Ark

"What looks breathtakingly simple and at times quite crude is actually highly sophisticated. It is very enjoyable, beautifuly performed, and a reminder that this kind of unfunded, unsung work touring mostly to village greens and playing fields is a crucial part of our theatre ecology."

Jenny Gilbert - July 20 2008 - The Independent on Sunday - on Noah Babel's Ark

"A mix of blank verse, rhyme, stand-up, song, jazz and klezmer music (all from the same six prodigiously gifted actors) bowl the story along, leaving it to the troupe's mimetic skills alone to create the carver's workshop, a local nightclub, the mortgage broker's office piled high with dusty ledgers, and finally and most spectacularly, the flooded Thames, which brings the villains their commeuppance. And all on an empty patch of grass. Staggering"

Tickets

Tickets can be bought by calling our Central Box Ofice on 01323-501260.