Stealthily scrounging your tax pennies, your guilty scratch card spendings, Matthews & Burtin are funded escapees. She from the cutthroat, self-made, individualist American dream. He from lukewarm, protectionist France. By air and by sea, and both to the Best of Both Worlds: the UK. Meeting in the middle, this show is an opportunity to take stock of what we value and how we go about valuing it.
Expect 1930s French street song and sleazy salesman rhetoric. Part cabaret, part lecture and part participatory experiment, The Best of Both Worlds: A Busker’s Opera is a good old fashioned music hall for the cash-strapped proles and the accidental gentrifiers.
This show was developed thanks to; Arts Council England, ARC (Stockton), University of Salford, East Street Arts (Leeds), Word of Warning (Manchester), Becci Sharrock, Daniel Bye, Joanne Scott, Sheila McCormick. Publicity photography by Layla Sailor. Dramaturgy by Leentje Van De Cruys.
