The Gall of The House of Sud (or The Perils of Youth Play) - Voila! Festival 2026

In an ancient rotting house an unseen visitor knocks at the front door. So begins an argument between a poisonous crone and her pompous, disgraced son, over who should get up and open it. The play is built on a single, deliberately bad joke, repeated and re‑shaped until it becomes something stranger: a dream‑riff on families, intergenerational trauma, envy, hate, the power of speech, and a haunting meditation on life, death, mothers and sons, consciousness, storytelling, and the theatre itself.

The underplot of the play concerns birth: the son is actually being born, and in the dream logic of the setting the play is taking place within the mother’s womb at the point where the waters are beginning to break. By the turning point, when the ‘door’ finally opens, the action escalates, and the languor of the first half activates a heightening of tension and rising action that results in the death, or birth, of the son. And also forgiveness. Through a single shared expression of love, after so much mutual hate and pain.

As two sides of a single consciousness, we discover by the curtain that their streak of victimhood, agony and arrogance, can only result in madness. And yet, these are deep psychic states common to all; life and death, sanity and insanity, are two sides of the same coin. The two characters are unflinching in vocalising the darker sides of the human condition, using the blackest comedy and the fiercest emotional registers to exorcise their own intergenerational curses.

Within the work is woven an undercurrent of Christian symbolism. The play asks, what if Christ were as scared, and terrifying, as ordinary people? Or what if the act of conception and birth, and prophesy and calling, were itself a byproduct of, and inducement to, madness itself?