FOLLOWING performances last summer of Red Ladies at the Southbank Centre and Margate Turner Contemporary gallery, the genre defying Clod Ensemble return with an intimate show with an original dark fairy tale at its heart.

The Red Chair, which can be seen at The Cube in Malvern on June 19, is a surreal ballad populated with larger than life characters, told in rich and saucy Scots dialect which draws the audience into the extraordinary world of a troubled family.

A contemporary take on folk and fairytale storytelling traditions, The Red Chair tells the story of a father who eats and eats until he turns into the chair he is sitting upon, the wife doomed to cook his meals and their 'inveesible' daughter.

Created in collaboration with artist Sarah Cameron and based on her original book, The Red Chair is performed with the physical vitality that has become a trademark of Clod Ensemble’s work, rooted in the training that both Sarah and director Suzy Willson received at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris. Woven into the production is an original sound score created by Clod Ensemble co-artistic director Paul Clark.

By turns haunting and humorous, The Red Chair takes audiences on a journey through a landscape of twisted reason, extreme compulsion and eye watering complacency, where domestic drudgery happens on an operatic scale and a father’s dereliction of duty reaches epic proportions.

The Red Chair is at The Cube in Malvern on Friday, June 19 at 8pm. To book, go to cubebookings.ticketsource.co.uk