Your Best Guess is about the plans we make for the things that don’t happen. The birthday cake for someone who never turns up. The champions shirts for the team that lost. The wedding clothes that stay in the box. It’s stories and songs about all these and more. Because we all do it, from lovers to governments, from musicians to town planners to the kid who’d rather be anywhere but here. It’s what life is really. Making the best plans you can. Making the best guess at what is going to happen and making the objects that will help you through it.
This is a show about what happens to those objects when the future we expected doesn’t happen. It’s intimate, funny, sad and real.
Spend an evening with two old friends, talking about family, interspersed with stories of dead rock stars, abandoned projects, space missions, and maybe a song.
Starring Manchester writer and performer Chris Thorpe, who has worked with Unlimited Theatre, RashDash, Belarus Free Theatre, the Royal Exchange, Royal Court and LIFT festival, in collaboration with Portuguese theatre company mala voadora.
“[Chris] Thorpe and [Jorge] Andrade’s performance style was intimate, almost casual, which suited the piece well and drew the audience in… Unexpectedly varied because it was dark-humoured, beautiful, surprising, sad, poetic, and sinister.” – Reviewer Number 9
“Your Best Guess will strike a chord deep in all of us as it perfectly encapsulates the human condition.” – Live Art Alive
“The story-telling is fluent and informal and feels strikingly real and personal… There are moments of lightness and humour but the predominant tone is quietly intense… Brilliant.” – Unrestricted Views
★★★★ “It sounds like a heavy topic and there were some chilling moments [but] there was an overall uplifting tone to the piece… There were moments when you could have heard a pin drop. It was simple but so effective – theatre in the purest form, no distractions, just a story that stays with you long after the show has ended.” – North West End
Simon Stephens on Chris Thorpe: “His work thrills me as much as the work of any playwright I read.”
A co-production of Porto City Hall Council for Culture, Culturgest and mala voadora, with support from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and funding from DGARTES.