Alan Lane’s company Slung Low has accrued a sizeable reputation for staging ebullient left-field material in site-specific productions, more often than not out of doors and on an improbably large scale. This current venture may not be his biggest, even though it involves an all-out civil war fought through the centre of Sheffield, with a company of 150 using swords, guns, mortars and explosives plus a Jeep and an armoured car. When I say that it is also a version of Arthurian legend, you may decide that one or the other of us needs a lie-down.

James Phillips’ script is a smart piece of work, superimposing elements of mythology on to a near-future dystopian tale of “a world where people have decided that the best way to go forwards is to go backwards”. A young woman named Bear (Tia Bannon) declares herself the new Arthur (whose name means “bear”) and catalyses the contemporary protest movement (a lot of Guy Fawkes masks in evidence) against familiar forms of state oppression; her new regime, in turn, becomes threatened by an insurrectionist crusade for purity of belief and behaviour, conducted by so-called “Galahadis”... the parallel is obvious, even without a video montage accessible at www.galahad.org.uk featuring much Middle Eastern footage. Chaos and breakdown ensue.

A professional cast of principals is augmented by several dozen protestors, troops and acolytes provided by Sheffield People’s Theatre, the community arm of the Crucible on whose stage the first of the three acts plays. Here, and in the second act just outside in Tudor Square, they are generally used as little more than human furniture to populate scenes, whilst main players engage in dialogue (transmitted to us through headphones) the length of the square, leading to extreme cases of Wimbledon neck amongst the audience. However, the all-out final act fought in front of Sheffield’s Town Hall pays off handsomely, as well as affording Lane the delicious irony of staging a full-pelt battle in the Peace Gardens. The self-parodic aspect of Phillips’ occasional overwriting doesn’t always come through, but it all makes for a provocative vision of how riskily we might re-invoke “English values” and, of course, an exhilarating spectacle for a summer evening.
 
Written for the Financial Times.