Almeida Summer Festival

A hodgepodge of ideas gets thrown into the melting pot of the Almeida Summer Festival as sparky, thought-provoking theatre bubbles up from four companies on the cutting edge of innovative performance. Cultures, ideologies and emotions; reality, dreams and delusions; clashes, dilemmas and ties; all these are shaken out and hung up to dry next to each other at the Almeida Theatre. First up, starting on the stage of the Almeida but then venturing out onto the streets of Islington is Last Seen, a multimedia piece by Slung Low that enters the world of people who go missing but are never found, those who just seem to disappear. The next two works are in the process of rummaging through the jumble sale of life: New York's Theatre of the Emerging American Movement (TEAM) looks to cowboys and casinos in The American Capitalist Project to get to the heart of the matter and Gulp's Or Nearest Offer auctions everything off - beds, mobiles, babies - in a soul-searching experiment. From the Islington-based company Tiata Fahodzi, who sold out at last year's festival, comes The Golden Hour, another dramatic exploration of British-African experience, set in a London NHS hospital. Tiata Fahodzi's Concert of African Music closes the festival.