Experience The Apple Cart show and the premiere of Tootingwalks

fanSHEN are a local professional theatre company who, through theatre, help people imagine what they haven’t thought of yet. Their work promotes ideas of environmental, social and financial sustain-agility and these ideas are embedded in their making process. 

fanSHEN will be doing two free shows in one day at the Tooting Foodival on Sunday 14 September.

Tootingwalks (midday)

At noon, you can experience the premiere of their new piece, Tootingwalks. Take a route map and an mp3 players on a half hour walk. While you walk, you'll hear Tooting stories, voices and music. The piece has taken over two months to create, working with and talking to a diverse range of groups and individuals from Tooting, ranging from Mushkil Aasaan to the South London Swimming Club, from Foodcycle to the Great Gustos, from the Tooting Community Garden to Sprout Arts, from Meet and Make to the Rhythm 'n' Babes toddlers music group. The walks have been compiled by playwrights Shireen Mula and Rachel Briscoe, with support from Dan Barnard and Chris Bone. 

The Apple Cart (2pm)

From 2pm onwards, fanSHEN will perform their irreverant, interactive family show The Apple Cart. Sisters Meryl, Beryl and Cheryl are on their way to Buckingham Palace with a cartload of magic apples for the Queen. Except somewhere between St Albans and Biggleswade, they took a wrong turning so now they’re here - in Tooting - with an unruly compendium of three-dimensional games which suggest that beneath their lavender-scented, rose-tinted exteriors, something peculiar is going on…

Accompanied by a pedal-powered soundtrack of the sisters’ favourite power ballads, The Apple Cart is an anarchically joyful mash-up of contemporary (sub)culture and traditional tales; for families, people who like to laugh and people who'd like things to be a bit different.

The Apple Cart has been touring nationally since May to fetes and festivals including Latitude and Green Man. It is performed by Dan Ford, Benedict Hopper, Shireen Mula and Sophie Steer. It was directed by Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe and designed by Chris Gylee and Cecile Tremolieres. It was developed in residence at the Dartington Space with the support of the Dartington Hall Trust, at Quarterhouse as part of The Shape of Things to Come and at Shoreditch Town Hall. The Apple Cart is supported by Applause and Home Live Art, OVNV Labs, Wandsworth Arts and the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Transition Town Tooting co-founder Lucy Neal saw fanSHEN’s previous production GreenandPleasantLand and praised it for “incredible ideas structures embedded into a family show. An unlikely format for such content but it worked.”