Artsadmin

Skip links

  1. Skip to content
  2. Skip to main menu
  3. Skip to search

Family Hold Back

Curious

Photo by Hugo Glendinning
2005

A highly visual, darkly comic and very well mannered performance airing the perversities of politeness of the English dinner table where no one mentions politics and everyone knows that Trotterscliffe is pronounced Trosley.

It is about being shut up, talked over and con… const… constantly interrupted. Over the three courses of the evening, a leakage of repressed bad manners begins to soak the corners of the pristine white tourniquet napkins as Paris struggles to confront what really lies underneath the perfectly laid table.

Beneath the damask, codes of Englishness are exposed as weapons of mass destruction, as is the ubiquitous silver service canteen. Paris stains, soils and sullies the preserves and codes of the white middle-class, breaking down cultural barriers and mechanisms of polite imprisonment from the inside.

“A visual metaphor exposing levels, tiers, hierarchies and centres of control. Paris is spot on.”

Total Theatre

Supported by Arts Council England and a One to One Bursary from the Live Art Development Agency.

Photo by Hugo Glendinning
Top