BET mailing list
Submit your email
BET on Twitter
Loading feed...
Charity number: 1077161
Company number: 3724349
Blue Elephant Theatre Privacy policy.
We use cookies for Google Analytics, but these can be disabled via your browser configuration.
Past programme
Showcases an eclectic range of fresh and interesting contemporary work, largely by emerging artists
Writers At Work
Werfel Vs Odets
- Writer: Michaela Ronzini
- Translator: Penny Black
- Director: Christopher Gutmann
- Cast: Saul Reichlin & Tom Sykes
- Writer: Emily Hunka
- Director: Emma Hewitt
- Cast: Sian Breckin, Laura Glover, Gareth Richardson, Simon Ryerson, Alex Watson, Fiona Whitelaw & Ben Wigzell
- Writer: Dorit Makleff
- Director: Ellie Joseph
- Cast: Matthew Delgaram-Nejad , Leanne Hall, Jessica Knight, Sam Lester, Robert Pearce & Julie Sandiford
- Writer: Duncan Gates
- Director: Serena B Robins
- Writer/Director: Serena B Robins
Los Angeles 1943: Franz Werfel has written a play based on his personal experiences in exile from the ever increasing expansion of the Nazis. The United States Theatre Guild brings in former leading New York playwright Clifford Odets to give the play a 'make-over' to appeal to American audiences. In this fictional account of an actual event, who will win this battle for Broadway?
Good Hands
A child is taken away from its family. Better off? Or in some imaginable danger in the hands of people that think they know best?
A look at the intricacies of family relationships, how children are cared for and when things are taken too far.
God Explodes Laughing
Part love story, part dreamlike soul-searching, God Explodes Laughing invites us to consider free will versus predestination through the lives of Udi, an Israeli photographer who lost his legs as a young soldier, and Lora, a British news reporter who travels the world telling other people’s stories instead of living her own.
The Defence
A young man is accused of killing a police officer, but after the dust has settled, who is really on trial? A play about love, evil, innocence and belief, where accusation is easy and defence is the hard part.
Experiments with Chai
A group of friends reunite after ten years and discover how differently their lives have changed. What painful secrets are shared over a cup of 'Chai'? And what courageous choices have to be made?
Not Knowing Who We Are
A man sets out to learn the art of conversation. A girl sets out to find her father. A mother has a box with two keys. Kevin has a spare room and a photograph no-one wants to see…
Preoccupied with books and photographs and talking only to himself and his imaginary wife, a man sets out to learn the art of conversation. He stumbles upon relationships built on lies and deceit where his odd behaviour gives rise to prejudice and accusations. When his brother comes to the rescue, truths emerge and a claustrophobic world is broken apart.
Press
Everything Is Different
In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories entitled Everything is Different. Inspired by the tale Chains or Chain-Links - where the characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances - this evening of music, dance & visual art looks at the simple connections we make in everyday life, magnifying these points to find beauty in the details.
35 Cents
It's election time on the romantic Caribbean island of Jamaica. The campaign has, however, been completely overwhelmed by extreme apathy & disillusionment.
Fatigued by the ever increasing levels of poverty, debt & corruption, a new student organization called the 'No Confidence Movement' emerges in an attempt to lead the electorate on a national boycott of the general elections. With various bilateral and multinational interests now at stake, a US-led military invasion is initiated to neutralize growing support for the boycott. It is from within this cauldron that the students of the 'No Confidence Movement' take us on a frenetic journey that will ultimately determine the political future of their island .
Press
Springheeled Two
Fish in a Bowl/Anthony Kurt:
AB sens 2
Iisa Ilona Jäntti
Ditto (interdisciplinary circus work)
Levantes Dance Theatre/Eleni Edipidi
(Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2009)
Gin & Satsumas (a dance theatre piece)
Etta Ermini Dance Theatre:
Archetypical Encounter of the Third Kind (physical theatre)
Rosalind Noctor & Martha Moopette:
Hedgehogs & Honeybeads (dance film)
Cathy Seago & Dancers:
How We Know We Are Here: Part 1 Cupp for Three (multimedia work)
The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses & Diary of a Madman
Do noses really live on the moon?
The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses/Diary of a Madman explores the thin line between imagination & madness, with a double-bill of Nikolai Gogol’s dark, hilarious masterpiece & Steve Hennessy’s new play about Gogol’s life.
Press
Weights
An island nobody ever leaves, the Bermuda Triangle, something like that.
Cuban-American writer Jesse Quinones charts a day in the life of a slum estate in Havana .
Cuba: a tropical idyll where the sun never sets, or a stifling prison where the days never end?
Press
Tales from Mumbai
.png)
An acrobatic production with an all-male cast with tales exploring metro-sexuality & the need for spirituality and hope in the harsh tough world of Mumbai.
Press
22 Death Scenes
Jumbled look to harness the power of autobiographical material and direct address, and explore placing this in the context of richer visual and theatrical worlds. Through ongoing collaboration with sound-maker Nick Gill, Jumbled closely links live sound with action, to create a multi-layered experience.
We don't want to die but we know people who have. We'd fight for you, we'd lie for you, you know it's true, everything we do we do it for you. Before your very eyes, Jumbled will die not once, not twice, but 22 times. Watch us as we meet our ends simply, quietly, loudly, gloriously, haltingly, beautifully.
Listen as we tell you about the scenes we wished we had seen, and play you the music we wished we had heard. Sob as we breathe our last breath, scream as we are mercilessly butchered, gasp as we escape unscathed only to be gunned down at the last minute.
Angels Don't Dance
In the psychiatric unit of a large urban hospital, Dr Jones conducts a first interview with Jamie:
"Am I broken?"
"I think you are"
"You see the cracks?"
"Some"
But things are not so straightforward. Unseen to Jones, Jamie is shadowed by Angella, a second personality you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy…
A practising psychiatrist, Brockman’s play is based on true accounts. His work was included in the Samuel French Best Short Plays of 2001 & 2005.
Press
Hazmat & Me
Just after the end of the world, a lonely survivor clings on to better times with a bicycle-powered reading lamp and a dusty old gramophone. He's fed up, he's had enough and he's ready to die.
So it's a shame that his friend Hazmat, an eight-foot radiation suit with a penchant for mischief, is having none of it. Hazmat has a different take on the man's past and won't let him go before he's made to face the truth…
Press
Plasmas
Anwesha Ahmed Company’s project to redefine Manipuri dance in the light of the contemporary world began what was to become a radical process. The title of the piece, Plasmas, is inspired by the notion of the stripping of electrons from atoms to create free-flowing Plasmas –the fourth state of matter.
Five dancers present this journey accompanied by a specially commissioned score, which combines live and improvised music. The instrumentation includes the sarangi, the kartal (played by one of the dancers) as well as the violin and congas.
Press
The Highway Crossing (or A Tale of a Golden Fish)
Three people. One night. Four billion dollars.
How far would you go for four billion dollars?
Would you give up the love of your life?
The Highway Crossing follows a young couple as they embark on an evening they will never forget. A witty and dark piece about human nature and the choices we are forced to make at a moment's notice.
Press
Actor
A performance reflecting on the realities of being an actor and a dancer: the ‘actor’ is the essence of a show, equipped with a body to move and act according tothe script, but he is also a person in his own right with his own emotions, experiences and thoughts.
Welcome Goodbye/Adeus Obrigada - Drama: Five Shipwrecks & a Twilight (Cinco Naufrágios e um Crepúsculo)
Based on texts by Austro-Hungarian dramatist Odon Von Horvath, Eugene O’Neill & others, Drama by Cão Solteiro weaves together people and places - both disparate and linked - like pieces of a jigsaw: the drowned, the hanged, the Devil, spectres, unborn children, old English songs and sharks… All come together under the black veil of night, at twilight…