Summer Festival Highlights

Highlight of the Brighton Arts Festival and lighting up the seaside streets this month is an unusual show called 'Street of Blood'.
It's the British premiere, in fact, of this extraordinary spectacle of satire and theatrical illusion using 14 two-foot puppets. The drama is set in a sleepy prairie town and stars lead puppet, the most-definitely OTT Edna Rural, her razor-toothed poodle Dorothy Parker, and her karaoke-singing gay terrorist son. Edna's husband died with Aids; she discovers her own HIV status and has to confront her mortality.
Ronnie Burkett, the play's director, won the Samuel Beckett award for best play at the Dublin Festival in 1998 and has spent hundreds of hours perfecting his marionette skills. This highly-acclaimed Canadian artist was inspired to write his 'prairie gothic-style' play by the HIV-contaminated blood supply scandal in the early nineties.

Expect plenty of bloody drama and a unique camp black humour from this much-touted new piece of theatre.
Positive Nation's review will appear next month. Street of Blood goes to Manchester's

Cultureshock Festival from 23 - 25 May and The Tramway in Glasgow from 31 May - 2 June. Brighton Festival: Tel 01273 700747 or visit: www.brighton-festival.org.uk