Volcano’s new 2023 show, Confessions of a Dark Room, marks the onset of winter and embraces the encroaching darkness.
We are moving from the bright long days of Summer through the darkening nights of Autumn and toward the long Winter months ahead. How can we relate to life’s dark days when we seem so obsessed with neon, with light, and with seeing everything that there is to see? It is as if we have only one sense. Little wonder, thus limited, that we are filled with anger, anxiety, and avarice.
Meet our small company of actors who are accused of numerous failings – tax fraud, dilettantism, lewdness... These actors perform their texts with all the skill and attention to detail that we expect of great talent. In the fading light, they invent a noirish tale of excess, paying homage to Yukio Mishima and Ingmar Bergman. Confessions of a Dark Room will be a beautiful, funny mess - together in the shadows of a dark still night, we will dream of other lands.
Confessions of a Dark Room continues the unique partnership between director Paul Davies and designer Bourdon Brindille, who together created Sincere as Objects and The Dread Zone. Movement direction is by Catherine Bennett. The show draws on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and on books by Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima and E.T.A. Hoffman.
Pear Chiravara, Christopher Elson a Thomas Leonard are our actors.
The show previews on 29 & 30 November, and runs until 16 December at Volcano's HQ in Swansea High Street.