NEWS: The Hunger @ Laurel’s

Image: Ellen Trevaskiss in The Hunger

Coming to Laurel’s in Whitley Bay on Monday 11^th April, Madeleine Farnhill’s The Hunger offers a chilling exposition of what her and Helen Denning’s Black Bright Theatre is all about.

A Yorkshire motto meaning ‘very dirty’, Black Bright is a fitting title for a company whose drama explores the grittier, darker corners of the human experience. However, like the paradox of ‘Black Bright’, this darkness is used to enlighten in The Hunger. Difficult questions are asked, and shocking realities dramatised, but all with a wider vision to force viewers to listen more attentively and reflect more deeply.

Their vision is to bring “complex female characters to the forefront” where rather than acting as “plot devices for the male leads”, they can exist in their own right. Their project retains a theatrical independence too, refusing pigeon-holing and melting genres together. Described as a kitchen-sink drama meets post-apocalyptic horror, The Hunger captures a mother-daughter relationship played out in a remote farm in the Yorkshire Dales. The daughter differs from the “strong, no-nonsense, pragmatic and Northern” mother and their relationship fractures with the appearance of a young boy.

The Hunger promises to drive straight into the very marrow of the human, and more specifically, female condition, dancing on the intersection of feminism, environmentalism and post-apocalypticism. The Yorkshire Dales, with their expansive beauty matched with a dramatic emptiness, are the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic drama of intimate connection, isolation and horror. The themes of plague also raise environmental concerns about humankind’s invasive relationship with animals.

The Hunger will be bold, unusual and shocking but, in brilliantly intense and absolutely unmissable.

The Hunger is performed at Laurel’s, Whitley Bay on Monday 11^th April.