Tim Crouch - Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a daringly unaccommodated piece of theatre, that switches between scathingly funny stand-up and an audacious act of collective imagining. It’s a celebration of live performance and a skewering of the state we’re in now. King Lear meets stand-up meets the metaverse.

King Lear is the Shakespeare play that speaks most urgently to our sense of modern catastrophe. It’s a godless play with an audaciously unhappy ending. The Fool is a model of an artist in King Lear and the Fool walks out of the play before the interval. I understand their decision. Many artists left during the pandemic – and continue to leave. Many theatres have gone. What will keep us here? Not the spiralling ticket prices. Not the technology which we can get much better elsewhere. But the live communion that responds to the people in the room; the shared witness; the imagination.