The UK’s first and only festival of feminist theatre is returning for a third year, with a line up including porn industry refuseniks, a celebrated 15th century cross-dresser, a Bruce Springsteen loving male alter ego, a mother and baby performance duo and teenage activists.

The star showing will be the London premiere (until Saturday 3 October) of Louise Orwin’s latest work, A Girl and A Gun (pictured above). It aims to explore the use of images of girls with guns on film as a means of attracting interest, referencing Jean-Luc Goddard’s well-known assertion that “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

Elsewhere, Hula House (Dates and times tbc) from Permanently Visible is inspired by true accounts and stories obtained from interviews with sex workers and women at The English Collective of Prostitutes. The show is an immersive, interactive performance featuring dark comedy, physical theatre and audience participation.

Themes of gender identity, drag and transgender will be particularly prevalent; Break Yourself (Thursday 1 October at 8pm), will see Ira Brand experimenting with what constructing a male alter ego allows her to say and do, while Joan (8-10 October at 7.30pm) will feature Drag Idol UK Champion 2014 Louis Cyfer in a one-woman show inspired by the story of Joan of Arc.

With a plethora of events until mid-October, the Calm Down Dear festival continues to create a space to discuss feminism in the dramatic sphere.

cptheatre.co.uk

Tags: Feminism, theatre

Actress and writer Florence Keith-Roach has teamed up with LIBRARY, a new  private members’ club for the eclectic literary and design communities, to put on a play that appoints women as the sexual predators and men as their prey. While simultaneously writing a sitcom called Frenching The Bully with with Freddy Syborn (Evening Standard’s 100 most influential people under 30, Bad Edication’s co writer with Jack Whitehall), Keith-Roach adapted the 19th century Arthur Schnitzler play, La Ronde and created a show that explores the inextricable link between sex and the human existence through the eyes of the modern woman.

Calling upon her family, the play sees Keith-Roach’s sister, artist and set designer Clementine Keith-Roach, who made her name creating sets for Bulgari, Mulberry and Louis Vutton, design the space in the basement floors of this stunning town house on St Martin’s Lane, creating a wild world of lilac infused 1970s disco.

The play runs from the 2nd – 5th July. Tickets can be purchased for £15 from eventbrite.co.uk

lib-rary.com

Tags: LIBRARY, theatre

Over the past six years, immersive theatre experience, You Me Bum Bum Train, has been a runaway train gathering speed; each new show sells-out faster than the last and every passenger gets off having had the ride of their life.

The concept is far from simple, with each performance consisting of an audience of one performed to by a cast of close to 200. The viewer is hurtled through a picaresque series of intimate scenes and surreal situations. However with the details of each show a closely guarded secret, it’s left to the posters to sum up the spirit of the night.

Over the years, Bum Bum Train creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who met while studying illustration at Brighton University, have cooked up the brilliant posters themselves and an exhibition of the best is currently at the Drawers Gallery in East London.

Conjuring Toulouse Lautrec’s paintings of the Moulin Rouge, drenched in a wave of sea-side ribaldry, each poster is a rollicking, riot of colour that doesn’t so much hint at what might be in store, but rather whacks one over the head Punch and Judy style. You have until Saturday to enter the world of You Me Bum Bum Train.

You Me Bum Bum Train Poster Exhibition is on until March 26 at The Haggerston, Drawers Gallery, 438 Kingsland Road, London, E8 4AA.

Tags: Drawers Gallery, Kate Bond, Morgan Lloyd, theatre, You Me Bum Bum Train