ALCHEMY

Brighton Dome

★★★★

“highly skilled bodies in dialogue with their histories and with one another”

Liam Francis Dance Company’s Alchemy fused autobiography and ensemble work into a double bill that explored identity, memory and connection. The two contrasting pieces revealed both the playful, introspective side of Francis’s practice and the physical precision of a tightly-knit group, offering a performance that was as thoughtful as it was athletic.

Lyre Liar was the more explicitly personal half. A former Rambert dancer and Dance Europe ‘Dancer of the Year’ nominee, Francis revisited formative works of his career through fragments of repertoire by Merce Cunningham, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Kate Prince. Rather than offering a straightforward retrospective, the piece unfolded as a dialogue between earlier and present versions of Francis and the dancers who originated or inspired those roles.

Using a PowerPoint presentation as a framing device, Francis wove together a witty, self-aware commentary. Humour ran through the piece alongside a clear-eyed honesty about the demands of the profession and the constant negotiation between authenticity and expectation. Taking the lyrebird, the ultimate mimic, as a conceptual hook, Francis layered autobiography, dance history and anecdote. At times he conversed with his own inner voice, at others lip-synced to recorded interviews, building a case for choreography as something continually passed from dancer to dancer: imitated, reshaped and made anew.

For the framing sequences Francis appeared in formal shirt and glasses at a lectern, engaging directly with the audience. As each dance excerpt emerged he shed a layer of costume, revealing a sequence of differently coloured bodysuits. In the final stage these were tied back together, recalling the fanned plumes of the lyrebird itself. At times the structure felt episodic, but the openness of the performance held it together, the body carrying both technical precision and lived experience. Francis’s control was evident in the clarity of line and phrasing, yet he allowed vulnerability to sit alongside virtuosity. Given the play on the spellings Lyre and Liar in the title, how much invention sits beside imitation remains a tantalising question. Sound design and composition by Jethro Cooke incorporated additional music by Massive Attack, David Tudor, Philip Selway and Claude Debussy.

Where Lyre Liar embraced the whimsical, A Body of Rumours committed fully to the physical. Four dancers shared the stage: Francis, Eloy Cojal Mestre, Jacob Wye and Stephen Quildan. Francis’s choreography drew on ballet, hip hop and contemporary forms, skilfully showcasing the distinct performance styles of the quartet. The movement language was fluid and grounded, at times competitive, at others unexpectedly tender. The dancers mirrored one another, folded into and lifted each other, moving with impressive assurance as they shifted seamlessly between tightly synchronised unison and looser, improvisatory exchanges. Their physical strength was matched by sensitivity, particularly in the weight-sharing passages where trust had to be visibly earned.

Set to live electronic music composed and performed by Chloe Mason, the score operated like a film soundtrack, mixed in the moment and closely tracking the dancers’ emotional trajectory. It sharpened moments of confrontation before opening into something more expansive.

Production design by Zoé Ritchie kept the stage largely open, allowing the dancers’ relationships to dominate, while the lighting design sculpted the space through shifting pools of brightness and shadow. In Lyre Liar a particularly effective sequence combined mirrors and lighting to create four versions of Francis: the real body, its reflection, a shadow and a silhouette. In A Body of Rumours, broader washes and sharper contrasts emphasised the collective dynamic.

The evening opened with a ten-minute curtain-raiser, I.M.I.T.I.L., created by Francis in conjunction with fourteen dancers from Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College. This brief piece echoed the programme’s wider concerns with community, as the dancers performed shared sequences that rippled across the stage like a wave.

With two very different works, Alchemy offered something immediate: highly skilled bodies in dialogue with their histories and with one another. For all the physical dynamism of the second half, it was the playful self-interrogation of Lyre Liar that lingered longest.

ALCHEMY

Brighton Dome

Reviewed on 4th March 2026

by Ellen Cheshire

Photography by Danny Fitzpatrick

ALCHEMY

★★★

“An entertaining and occasionally sharp piece of political theatre”

A play about Liz Truss arrives with an odd sense of temporal dislocation. Chronologically, her premiership only ended little more than three years ago, yet the relentless chaos that has filled the intervening period makes it feel like ancient history. That feeling of distance is difficult to shake, and The Last Days of Liz Truss?, for all its energy and wit, doesn’t always persuade you that there is fertile ground to till.

Initially drenched in the red, white and blue lights of a Union Jack, a melodic saxophone sighing in the background, Truss sits centre stage: forlorn, yet defiant. Over the following near two-hour running time, writer Greg Wilkinson takes us on a largely chronological journey through her rise and fall, framed by her last morning at Number Ten. The premise promises an exploration, comic and tragic in equal measure, of the tensions between ambition and ability, between vision and political reality.

There is no shortage of sharp wordplay and knowing jokes. Early on, Wilkinson draws on Truss’s real name — she was born Mary Elizabeth — for a riff on divided loyalties: in Tudor England, you were either for Elizabeth or for Mary, never both. It is a line that delights in its own neatness, and the play has many others, such as a recurring callback to karaoke sessions with Thérèse Coffey that’s reliably mined for laughs. Yet for all the verbal dexterity, the script only occasionally gets beneath the surface of its subject. Glimpses of the person behind the politician emerge — most intimately, a childhood insistence on being Elizabeth rather than Mary — but they remain just that: glimpses.

The script vacillates between skewering and sympathy. The office of prime minister is not presented as a particularly dignified one, and Wilkinson leans into the idea that Truss was poorly advised. Yet this is balanced by the sheer Truss-ness of our protagonist: a character constitutionally oblivious, who assumes that any challenge is confirmation of her correctness, and who accepts no blame for anything — making for a compelling portrait, if not always a complete one.

Emma Wilkinson Wright is an excellent Truss, with Director Anthony Shrubsall working with her to find moments of vulnerability and humanity that go beyond what the script alone provides. That peculiar stiffness so familiar from television is rendered with impressive naturalism, and she captures the clipped declarations and curious combination of defiance and bafflement that defined Truss’s public persona, occasionally revealing something more human than television ever did. The set and costume design (Male Arcucci) is a thoughtful complement, the Swatch watch and Claire’s Accessories jewellery quietly doing the work of making Truss seem relatable — a woman of the people, or at least trying to be. Steve Nallon, as the voice of Margaret Thatcher (a skill honed during his years on Spitting Image) and others, provides effective voiceover support, though some recorded impressions lack energy, leaving the central performance with less to play off than it deserves.

As the production moves towards its conclusion, Truss pivots into something approaching Cassandra: a prophet dismissed, warning of a Britain diminished by its reluctance to grow. The lighting design (Tom Younger) is particularly effective here, the stage darkening and contracting as she speaks, the shrinking state rendered with quiet visual intelligence. The ending, however, strains credibility — Truss acquiring a near-supernatural prescience that had eluded her throughout, tipping the play away from character study and into prophetic monologue.

Truss is a fascinating political footnote, and this production is at its best when it leans into that strangeness. But it ultimately leaves you wondering whether, perhaps, a footnote is all she should be consigned to. An entertaining and occasionally sharp piece of political theatre, but one that feels more like a chronicle than a reckoning. The question mark in the The Last Days of Liz Truss? promises interrogation; the play itself rarely delivers it.

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ALCHEMY

★★★★

Brighton Dome

ALCHEMY

Brighton Dome

★★★★

“highly skilled bodies in dialogue with their histories and with one another”