Chris Thorpe Collaborates With Portuguese Theatre Company Mala Voadora to Bring YOUR BEST GUEST to HOME

We can't help living in the future - booking flights for holidays, organising birthday parties, writing applications, sending out invitations, and producing T-shirts for tours. But all of this is merely supposition. When the time comes, these things may happen according to plan. Or they may not. Life is entirely unpredictable.

But what if we could rewrite history? What if we could imagine that things had turned out differently even if they had not? What if we could anticipate all roads to the future, so that we could be prepared for any possible scenario?

Your Best Guess, a collaboration between leading Portuguese theatre company mala voadora and Manchester-based writer and performer Chris Thorpe, is stories and songs about the plans we make for the things that don't happen. Because we all do it, from lovers to governments, from musicians to town planners, to the kid who'd rather be anywhere but here. It's what life is really. Making the best plans you can. Making the best guess at what is going to happen and making the objects that will help you through it.

This is a show about when the future we expected doesn't happen. It's intimate, funny, sad and real. Spend an evening with two old friends, talking about family, interspersed with stories of dead rock stars, abandoned projects, space missions, and maybe a song. In exploring the unpredictability of the course of history, does that history actually happen, or does it never take place at all? All will be revealed. Or will it? Rewriting history: your best guess.

Your Best Guess was premiered in July 2015 at Porto and Culturgest in Lisbon. Chris Thorpe has since written three plays for mala voadora: Overdrama, House & Garden, and Dead End, quickly becoming essential in the company's creative process. In Your Best Guess, Chris is writing but also sharing the stage with Jorge Andrade, mala voadora's artistic director.

Your Best Guess is a co-production of Porto City Hall Council for Culture, Culturgest and mala voadora, with support from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and funding from DGARTES.