March 3, 2018
(English) NTW Qtine and WMC
National Theatre Wales & Quarantine with Wales Millennium Centre for Festival of Voice.
The world turns - and people and language move with it. We’re living in an age of mass migration. The linguists tell us we’re moving towards a future in which people speak multiple languages and create new ones to sit in the gaps.
National Theatre Wales and Quarantine’s new production, performed by Jonny Cotsen, is inspired by the theatricality of language lessons, and from conversations with migrants in Wales and across the UK who learn English for all kinds of reasons – for business, for pleasure, for survival, to take part, to pass the test…
English asks what happens when we move to another country and don’t really know how to say who we are, how to disagree, how to be in love, how to be funny - how to say what life is really about.
Made in Wales but with a global perspective, this performance pulls pop songs apart, tears grammar to pieces and constructs a contemporary Babel that invites all the languages in the room to be heard.
