HighTide festival to return to Suffolk in September

This September, HighTide festival will return to Aldeburgh in Suffolk to celebrate its tenth anniversary.

The annual festival is known for showcasing new playwrights and producing new plays. This year’s event will take place between the 8th and the 18th of September.

This year’s line-up has been designed to commemorate ten-years of writing for the festival.

Highlights will include the world premiere of The Path, a production that has been created by eight HighTide alumni playwrights.

The show is based around the secret history of Aldeburgh, both real and imagined.

The Path is composed of eight short plays which have been designed to be listened to through headsets while audience members visit locations around the town.

Four other new commissions will feature in the festival’s programme, including The Sugar-Coated Bullets of Bourgeoisie, Girls, Pilgrims and In Fidelity.

The Sugar-Coated Bullets of Bourgeoisie is based on the decade the playwrite spent studying Rotten Peach Village, a rural village of China.

The show explores the community’s strength, ambition and unity when the village is subject to change and turmoil.

Girls focuses on three friends – Tisana, Ruhab and Haleema, who live in a time of great extremism in Nigeria. The play aims to show the real story behind what was once a headline or hashtag and news that was quickly forgotten.

Pilgrims, meanwhile, tells the story of adventure between three characters. On one hand, it focuses on adrenaline junkies Dan and Will who climbed Mount Everest aged 18, who now crave adventure and seek new challenges, and on the other hand, it focuses on Rachel who studies folklore and prefers people to adventures.

The final new show is In Fidelity, which is part theatrical experiment and part presentation. It focuses on the real life playwrite Rob, who underwent an MRI scan as part of his research for the show, and found that when analysing images from the scan, parts of his brain surged when seeing a photo of his wife.

The show marks the fifteen year anniversary of Rob and his wife’s first date, and takes a look at both love and evolutionary theory.

For more information visit www.hightide.org.uk.