The Walk, Manchester International Festival, 28th July to 3rd November
The Walk is an international cultural collaboration born of the ongoing refugee crisis and the Good Chance theatre company’s The Jungle (2015) which came out of the Calais refugee camp to play in London and on Broadway. After a prelude in Manchester, a ten-foot-tall puppet named Little Amal will set out from the Syrian-Turkish border to begin an 800-kilometre trek across Greece, Italy, Germany, France and England in search of her mother. She is accompanied by dance troupes, processions, installations and humanitarian organisations. The event involves 250 creative partners, including Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Opera House. The artistic director is Amir Nizar Zuabi, the producers led by Stephen Daldry of The Crown and David Lan formerly of the Young Vic.
South Pacific, Chichester Festival Theatre, 5th July to 4th September
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great 1949 musical addresses the American unease after Pearl Harbour and shines like a modern theatrical beacon between Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Sondheim's Pacific Overtures as an acid musical of American imperialism. It is 20 years since Trevor Nunn’s revelatory production, so director Daniel Evans has his hands full matching this exuberant, still familiar score with adjustments to James Michener's original stories of war-time paradise, racial prejudice, and emotional power play.
Cascando, Barbican Theatre, 6th to 11th July
Irish theatre company Pan Pan last presented a wonderful version of Beckett’s All That Fall at the Barbican in 2015. They return with another Beckett radio play, a dialogue between words and music, as a promenade production along the high walks of the east London arts centre. This strange, poetic, beguiling text, first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1964, will challenge your notions of “who’s in charge” of the narrative in theatre in a complex and unusual manner.
