Photo Flash: CALLISTO: A QUEER EPIC's Transfer at Arcola Theatre

Howard Coase's Callisto: a queer epic transferred from the Edinburgh Fringe to Arcola Theatre last month, as part of its EH to E8. The play tells a constellation of four stories scattered across time and space, from a London opera house in 1675 all the way to a research lab on the Moon in the year 2223, spanning the historical and the fictional and everything in between.

Thomas Bailey - Director of CALLISTO: A QUEER EPIC

We're delighted to have been given the chance by the Arcola to develop Callisto into a full-length play. Howard's script, telling four interweaving queer stories from across time and space, deserved and demanded more stage time, and this new platform also let us explore staging ideas that we didn't have time for in Edinburgh.

It was such a joy to see that audience demand for this new play was so high; all six scheduled performances sold out in advance, leading to us adding an extra matinee. We're hugely grateful to the Arcola for helping us make the most of this week-long slot, and can't wait for the next stage of Callisto's journey.

Emma D'Arcy - Artistic Director of FORWARD ARENA

The entirety of our design budget was spent on building our own system of lights that worked with the existing architecture of Arcola's Studio 2. This acted as an intervention in the existing space rather than placing a theatrical set on the space. Our intention was to house Callisto in a sensually empathetic environment, and to facilitate greater audience immersion into the Callisto universe!

The four stories of Callisto:

London, 1675: Arabella Hunt is the star of Cavalli's La Callisto, and one half of the first recorded lesbIan Marriage in British history. Her love, Amy Poulter, watches the opera, posing as a man and praying the truth of their marriage will remain undiscovered.

Worcester, 1939: Alan Turing has lost his first love, Christopher Morcom. Out of mutual mourning comes an unexpected friendship between Alan and the Christopher's bohemian mother, Miss Swan. Neither of them can accept what they've lost and, as Miss Swan turns to Catholicism, Alan marches towards the earliest theories of Artificial Intelligence.

Nebraska, 1975: When Tammy Frazer's husband brings home a porn film in an attempt to bring spice to their polite suburban sex life, Tammy deserts him along with her small-town home, and sets out on a journey to the West Coast to find the new love of her life at Callisto Studios: porn star Daisy Lew.

The Moon, 2223: Cal.658, the world's most emotionally sophisticated A.I., is successfully launched for the final time: learning at light speed, staring at the stars, and impossibly in love with their Maker.

See photographs below by Jamie Scott-Smith | twitter | facebook