RURAL communities in East Hampshire are being treated to a touring production from The Rude Mechanical Theatre Co.
Macbyrd is a comedy thriller, with 16 of the characters being birds, including Inspector Seed, a pigeon, as the detective.
Set in 1940, it is about the changes to a small village in rural Sussex, Jevington, brought about by the threat of invasion, and how this impacts on the Women’s Institute, the cricket club, the village play and on relationships.
Up above, there is a power struggle among the birds, and the swan, a symbol of a certain kind of traditional Englishness and social structure, is murdered by the upstart raven, Macbyrd, who resents the swan’s snobbish disregard for the poor, the sparrows.
Writer and director Pete Talbot said: “There are, it has to be admitted, a few echoes of a certain Shakespeare play. Macbyrd is told by the ‘gypsy magpies’ that his time has come, that ‘sleek birds, black against the sky’, will rule.”
The Rude Mechanicals are a contemporary commedia dell’arte company working in a carnivalesque tradition going back thousands of years.
See Macbyrd at Hambledon Village Hall on June 25; Selborne Primary School on July 8; and Sheet Recreation Ground on July 17. Performances are at 7.30pm. Tickets are £15 and are available online at www.therude mechanicaltheatre.co.uk