Glasgay! Festival / Theatre North: Handel’s Cross

Two men enact an unsettling fantasy about the secrecy, obsession and repressed desire behind the creation of Handel’s sublime music.

Handel’s Cross is the most recent piece of ground-breaking performance by Theatre North, the award-winning company whose Billy Budd Sailor was highly praised at Glasgay! 2011 (** “thoughtful and thought-provoking, imaginatively staged” - Mary Brennan, The Herald).

Acclaimed at its premiere in Dublin in May 2013 (“a tour de force.... a theatrical treat for all the senses” - Dublin Gay Theatre), Handel’s Cross is an audacious and unsettling fantasy that uncovers the disturbing underworld of pain and desire beneath the surface of great art. A modern man seeks release in bondage and punishment - and an ageing genius schemes to find relief in a world of sumptuous feasts, gorgeous castrati and debauched divas.

Theatre North makes edgy contemporary performances with a gay sensibility, extending boundaries and interrogating facets of theatre, performance and live art. They have staged their work in theatres, bathrooms, hotels, galleries, sex-shops, bars and cafes.

Writer/Performer Martin Lewton has given over fifty performances of his piece Naked Homo (Brighton, London, Dublin) since 2009. His acclaimed Billy Budd Sailor received the ‘Star of the Brighton Festival 2011’ Award. Currently a resident artist at The Basement Brighton (where he gave fifty performances of his piece Cock for the 2012 Brighton Festival), he is now developing two new performances.

Director/Performer Andrew McKinnon has had a long and varied career as director and producer. He has worked with Theatre North since 2008. He is also Programme Director of the MA in Creative Producing at Birkbeck, University of London.

Acclaim for Billy Budd Sailor:
“ …riveting..there isn’t a performance this intimate or surprising around” - Mark Shenton, The Stage
“ in this neat show nakedness hides many secrets” - Lyn Gardner The Guardian

The performance includes nudity, very strong language and adult sexual content throughout.