Rabbit Round Up

Hugh Hughes' USA tour of Story of a Rabbit came to a close last week and this morning I gathered and filed away all the press coverage from the tour. There are some wonderful comments, both from newspapers and the Blogosphere.

One review, on the Charleston City Paper's Spoleto Buzz Blog, began with these words:

"Hugh Hughes made me cry. It's a good thing."


The same blog also named Story of a Rabbit the best show at the festival, calling it,

"Pitch-perfect theater"


The Lantern tells us that in Ohio,

"some in the audience were left with tears in their eyes, while others had smiles on their faces"

Which leads me to my absolute favourite. A review in the Charleston SC newspaper urged people to go and see Story of a Rabbit with a wonderfully Hugh-ish call to arms!

"embrace it, and remember that Life IS spectacular!"

Wexner Center Podcast

Final preparations are underway for Hugh Hughes' tour to the USA with Story of a Rabbit. Tom, our Production Manager, will be boarding his plane on Monday, with Hugh and Aled following soon after!

We're extremely excited to be visiting the Wexner Center in Ohio, Spoleto Festival in Charleston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Click here for the full tour schedule and for details of how to book tickets.

Our friends at the Wexner Center have just released a podcast, in which Chuck Helm, their Director of Performing Arts, discusses his memories of seeing Story of a Rabbit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 and explains why he's so excited to have to show in Ohio. Click here to have a listen!

Thanks to plemjr for this photo of the Wexner Center!

All across the world

In just over 24 hours time, a momentous occasion in the history of Hoipolloi will occur. When I discovered this, just yesterday, I shrieked with excitement at the good fortune that's being delivered to us by time zone variations!

Our first performance of Floating here at the Ten Days on the Island festival in Launceston, Tasmania kicks off at 2pm on Saturday. This also happens to be 8pm on Friday in Los Angeles when My Uncle Arly will be 30mins into its first public performance at UCLA's Freud Playhouse.

And thus, for the very first time, two Hoipolloi shows will be playing at exactly the same time in two differerent corners of the world, neither of which are our home territory!

It's not actually the first time we've had two shows performed on different continents on the same day; if you cast your mind back to about this time last year, Hugh and Aled were over in Bogota, Colombia performing Story of a Rabbit whilst The Doubtful Guest was running at Watford Palace. However, none of these performances occured at exactly the same moment in time.

If you're in the UK and would like to celebrate the moment, I'm afraid you'll have to stay up until 3am on Saturday morning, but if you happen to be in Los Angeles or Launceston, please join us for one of these historic shows!

First day

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

I’m sitting at a desk, in an office. This is a new experience and my adolescent self would be furious if he knew. Around the age of 14, I decided that office jobs were a soul-destroying fate worse than death, and that if necessary I would run away to South America and join a shady Socialist resistance movement, rather than spend a career surrounded by stationery and filing cabinets.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve outgrown that phase and haven’t raged against any machines for ages. These days I prefer making connections. In fact, my teenage self would be delighted that the office I’ll be working in for the next year belongs to Hoipolloi. I’ll be helping out in rehearsal rooms, as well as the office, so I can learn how a company like Hoipolloi operates on both a creative and a practical level.

I first encountered Hoipolloi four or five years ago and they quickly became one of my very favourite theatre companies. It’s my first day here and I can’t quite believe that I’m now working at Hoipolloi, not just watching them! If my predecessor Sara’s last entry on the blog is anything to go by, I’m in for a wonderful year.

I’ll be writing on the blog fairly regularly, keeping you informed of everything that Hoipolloi are up to. We’re going to be busy! The Doubtful Guest will be back on tour in the UK this autumn and Hugh Hughes is heading to Helsinki, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and the USA.

Don’t forget to keep checking the website for the latest tour dates!

A Gorey Discovery...

Posted by Shon Dale-Jones (Artistic Director, Hoipolloi.)

When Hoipolloi toured My Uncle Arly to the USA in March 2005 I was interested to find out how popular Edward Lear was over there. I went into a children’s bookstore to look for one of his titles, but couldn’t find one, so I asked the shop attendant whether or not they stocked any Edward Lear.

She said, “Is he the guy Edward Gorey did some illustrations for? I think he is”, and walked towards one of the bookshelves in the corner of the shop. She handed me a collection of Edward Gorey’s illustrations – which included one for Edward Lear’s, "The Jumblies."

Before I knew it I had looked through the whole book and was asking the shop attendant for more Edward Gorey. She found five or six of his titles and I spent the next hour immersed in his work.

By the time I left the USA later that month I’d bought every title I could find in every bookstore I walked into. On the plane journey home I kept returning to The Doubtful Guest and got hooked on the world of this illustrated story.

Edward Gorey’s fantastical imagination and creation of unusual and biologically questionable creatures are perfect inspiration for the theatrical world of Hoipolloi.

We are approaching the tone of the illustrations, the world of the family and their house and the magical nature of the doubtful guest itself. The more we work on it the more we find. We are continually surprised how much there is to discover through this story.

We very much look forward to our continued work on this project. We are excited by what is emerging and feel privileged to be working with such powerful and fantastic source material.