Odd if you dare

ODD if you dare, 1995 a Barclays New Stages Award Winner Barking, Barmy, Batty, Bobbins - from the outside lives are ODD 25,000 people go missing every year. 10,000 young people of 18 or younger are simply thrown away. Trash lives collide with trash puppets - turning the mundane into the monumental. "doo-cot speak for the voiceless in our society: the disenfranchised. Long may it continue to put words into other people's mouths." Stella Hall in Animations. "The exquisite and the tawdry and the damned go hand in hand in the work of doo-cot." Lyn Gardner, The Guardian "Some of the highlights include fully jointed dog sculpture made from scrap, inventive shadow screens, traffic and street lights and haunting puppets that are so expressive they make Punch and Judy look socially inept." The Stage "I have heard this production is a bit 'hot'" Dursley Tory Councillor, Basil Allen "What seems certain is that, like Peacok, ODD will capute all the contradictions and extremes of urban life from the glittering and seductive beauty of wet city nights to the menace and imagined violence that lurks in the shadows. It is these contradicitons explored through disquieting, often savage imagery that doo-cot has made entirely its own." Lyn Gardner, The Guardain "ODD if you dare is a story of love, sex and death in 1990s Britain. What more could you ask for? Just don't bring the kids." The List, Glasgow :Their idiosyncratic and risk taking approach to theatre defies easy categorisation and elicits vehement responses from both their fans and detractors. They tackle frequently bleak and desolate subject matter without polemic, but with humour and compassion...Their theatre is firmly rooted in a contemporary urban environment, drawing on stories and images from the area where they base themselves - the bedsitland conjured up by Morrisey's angst ridden anthems." Minty Donald, The Glasgow Herald "A dress made from 600 coloured condoms is one of the most bizarre elements in ODD if you dare" The Scotsman "As I entered the darkened theatre, Doreen Edwards magnificent voice rang out, a powerful jazz tinged instrument that carries the sound of the city streets in each note. Together with Hallet's haunting soundtrack she establishes the scene - a woman alone, outside in Manchester, in every city." Stella Hall, Animations "The characters in the contemporary drama may only be puppets made out of a load of old urban junk, but they take on a strangely vivid persona and a disturbing reality partly, I think, to do with sensitive way they are manipulated by the animators, and more than a little because of the haunting expressions worn on their faces." Lynne Walker, Kaleidoscope, Radio 4

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