Steve Larkin’s retelling of Tess of the D’Ubervilles – George Square Underbelly

You get a bit nervous when there are only a dozen or so people queuing for your chosen show. Great flows of festival folk are streaming past to go to something much more popular at a much bigger venue just round the corner, and you wonder, have I made a mistake here?
But what happened inside the small dark theatre at the George Square Underbelly was so powerful that any doubts were quickly set aside as you become completely absorbed in Steve Larkin’s brilliant prose and powerful poems as he re-imagines Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles, taking it away from the West country to the North East of England, to Newcastle and to Leeds, in a dark contemporary recreation of the Hardy tragedy.
He catches you by your emotional nerve ends and doesn’t let go for the hour or so of astonishingly good story telling. It may have gone on for slightly too long, but a small price to pay for a proper good festival theatrical experience. I shall seek out more of this bloke.