Be among the first to step into The Crooked Hour – where local folklore meets raw, compelling storytelling. Locally-based artist Richard Knight presents the first public reading of this gripping new folk-horror play born out of a project originally commissioned for the RiverLight Festival.

This special event offers an insider look at a work in progress. Performed as a dynamic rehearsed reading, the cast will move into the main gallery, working directly with their scripts to bring Knight’s eerie narrative to life for the very first time.

Content Advisory: Please note that this production contains adult themes and strong language. Recommended for audiences aged 16 years+.

Free, no need to book. Seated audience.

THE CROOKED HOUR
K. Dick Turpin is outside the Bull and Dog with a Bargain Booze carrier bag, arguing with the missus. He and Ned are counting sheep in old Lincolnshire numbers- yan, tan, tethera. The legend of Turpin was a confection built after the fact. This play is interested in what lies beneath the myth, and what persists- Turpin still appears at the Ruskington turn-off on the A15, his ghost face lit in passing headlights. Meanwhile, Moll Moonlight is calling an Uber.

The Crooked Hour moves between centuries without announcing it, drawing on the folk customs of this county — the Ran Tan, the outlawed widdershins dance, the boundary rites — and the people history didn’t bother to record. Its language moves between Lincolnshire dialect, Polari and thieves’ cant, and dissolves, by the end, into Dada incantation: cut-up as a form of magic, a way of letting the future bleed into the present.

At the centre is Brigid, a clairsentient kept for years by a priesthood that used her gifts and stole her autonomy, and Michelle, a traveller who has learned to be invisible, who knows how to find what others overlook. It doesn’t end in triumph. Something is cracking open, fermenting, but the weight of living inside systems built by and for others is also felt. Folk memory and Rough Music are almost, but not quite, enough.