Live action War Of The Worlds from imitating the dog

Lancaster-based innovative theatre company imitating the dog will test their technological skills to the limit with their live action version of H G Wells' War Of The Worlds.

War Of The Worlds will tour next year to Cast, Doncaster (February 5-7); The Dukes, Lancaster (February 18-21); the Lowry, Salford (February 25-28); Liverpool Playhouse (March 4-7); Theatr Clwyd, Mold (April 15-18) and Blackpool Grand (April 15-18), as well as a couple of dates in Switzerland.

Using miniature environments, model worlds, camera tricks and projection, imitating the dog will mix live and recorded, animate and inanimate, to create an apocalyptic tale of alien invasion and the unfolding destruction of everything we hold dear.

Company co-director and artistic director Andrew Quick said: “It’s a great story and its themes of paranoia, moral panic, technological and ecological catastrophe and the ways in which society implodes when faced with crisis, seem so relevant to today.

“We are testing our technological and storytelling skills to the limit, but producing some amazing sequences that do justice to the novel and also connect to contemporary concerns."

The techniques in use are more familiar in movies, mixing model work with live action: "Imagine a detailed model of a destroyed city," explained Andrew, "you see a performer operate a camera that moves through its devastated buildings. At the same time, in another part of the stage, you see a live performer being filmed and the image of their performance is then projected into the city landscape, so you see them looking out of one of the windows in one of its burnt-out buildings.

"This interlacing of live action and the miniature, the real and the model, is a new direction for us, but it creates some stunning effects – which we need to create the extraordinary, compelling and epic story we are telling, all with only four performers.

"Of all productions across 27 years of theatre making, this is the most ambitious and technologically challenging work we have made.”

More info here