“This was the best show I’ve seen in a very long time. AWESOMELY HILARIOUS. ”
Ulster Kama Sutra was a puppet show based on confessions by people from across Northern Ireland. The show lifts the lid on love and sex, featuring sketches, songs, and plenty of ‘what Ulster said’: direct confession transcribed, edited and put into the mouths of wooly knitted puppets. The show originated with an installation inviting anonymous confession in 2011, called the 'Foxy Box of Thoughts', and was then developed through workshops run with NI creatives and visiting guest artists Abhishek Thapar from Puna in India. The Ulster Kama Sutra was a run-away success of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in 2012 which lead to more province-wide workshops and the development of 40 minutes of new additional material which toured the island in 2013. To get a real sense of the madcap energy of that early show click on https://youtu.be/E6ey_F173WA, or watch this video:
Written by: Andrea Montgomery, Anthony Toner & Nuala McKeever. Produced & Directed by: Andrea Montgomery. Actors: Caroline Curran, Neil Keery, Shri Patel, John Shayegh.
“Possibly the most entertaining show I’ve ever seen! I laughed out loud throughout. Excellent stuff! Keep it up - so to speak! ”
Reviews
Joe Nawaz in the Belfast Telegraph gives the show the top accolade: four stars. Nawaz says:
What followed was a delirious whistlestop tour through sketches and songs that held up a mirror to our rather parochial apprehensions about sex and sexuality...very funny.
...funny and well-observed enough to draw laughs of shameless recognition and most refreshingly, the Ulster Kama Sutra took itself every bit as seriously as the title suggested. That is, not really very seriously at all. ...it was hard not be beguiled by the dirtiest set of puppets since Matthew Corbett's washing machine went on the blink. Us Belfast sophisticates laughed like drains spiked with nitrous oxide.
Tammy Moore gives The Ulster Kama Sutra a cracker of a review in NI Scene. Moore says:
Seriously though, although the jokes come thick and fast – from the prudish Ulster porn movie to the terrifying euphemisms of the sex education nun (silly whistles, bell turbots and dingly dells) – there’s more to the show than naughty cabaret. It is also thought-provoking, touching and sometimes even sad.
Director Montgomery choreographs the emotions of the performance with a sure hand, getting the audience laughing and then undercutting it with raw honesty. It is a particularly Northern Irish way of doing things, wrapping anything hurtful up in a protective layer of mockery.
Read the whole review at: NI Scene