The Man Who Woke Up Dead @ Waterside Arts Centre, Manchester, 27-29 Jun

Inspired by film noir, Hitchcock, and Orwell’s classic 1984, The Man Who Woke Up Dead is a dark and richly compelling thriller that sets out to challenge our conceptions of what we believe to be ‘truth’.

During an alternate Cold War, a man wakes on the side of a street with no memories, but with a pressing, urgent sense of paranoia. In the already sinister setting of a 1950s hospital, the play watches this mystery man – along with his nurse and doctor – struggle with new revelations, long buried secrets and their swiftly shifting definitions of reality as the lines between truth and delusion become more and more blurred.

Exploring the relationships between psychosis, paranoia and conspiracy, The Man Who Woke Up Dead is the latest production from young and innovative theatre company Square Peg (Kate Robinson and Michael White), and is being supported by Creative Industries Trafford’s first To The Stage commission. Formed in 2011, Square Peg aim to create three-dimensional, near cinematic performances out of minimalistic stages and only a handful of props.

“The way we approach the stage is very filmic and highly choreographed, but in a very driven, storytelling way,” explains White, founding member of Square Peg, and star – alongside Robinson, and actor Phil Minns – and co-director of The Man Who Woke Up Dead. “Once we found that language, the way that the play could move very simply with just a few objects and three actors, it suddenly influenced the way that we could write the script. It meant that the script was open to the stage and equally the stage was open to what the script wanted.”

Square Peg believe that the visual and physical elements of a performance are equally as important as the script. This is what has led them to insist that The Man Who Woke Up Dead must maintain utter precision in movement, in order to carry its filmic atmosphere onto the stage. The actors’ ability to convey driving a car live on stage out of not much more than thin air gives credence to White’s assurance that: “If we’re doing a movement, it has to mean something. We have to understand what it is saying to the audience – we’re not just going to fill the stage with random movement.” [Conori Bell-Bhuiyan]