Public Enemies
Red Carpet Launch
A commissioned performance intervention

In 2009, FoulPlay were commissioned by the Duke of Yorks Cinema in Brighton, to create and perform at the official 'red carpet' première of the film Public Enemies, a bio-pic starring Johnny Depp as iconic gangster John Dillinger.
   A work was devised and performed without informing the audience such was happening. As the audience enters the atmospheric auditorium and find their seats, they are courteously offered candy smokables from two ravishing, tray carrying, cigarette girls (Han Nicholls & Astral Delamare).
   Using a devised foiling and counter-foiling sequence of actions the audience were fed a rapid rolling sequence of events. Greeted by a glamorous blonde bombshell singer (Sarah X. Delmonte) who offers to sing a song at the stage front. Just as she launches into her recital, two loud brash gangsters (Ulysses Black & Annie Brooks) burst into the two isles waving handguns and demanding people hand over their jewellery and money. As their slightly slapstick double-act of comical gun totting incompetence spirals into a fiasco, a sudden disturbance heralds the announcement of the Inspector (Alex Mannion-Jones) who stands up from amidst the audience in the balcony and places the gangsters under arrest. Before the proclamation is complete, the Big Boss (Liability Eden) appears on stage and takes the singer hostage. Soon a stand off erupts as the investigator having descending to the main auditorium enters the frey. In a second it looks like all is lost, when the two cigarette girls reveal the tommy-splurge-guns under their vending trays and set about the gangsters. The intervention ends with the two incompetent gangsters in 'cuffs, the singer freed and of course the Big Boss having escaped.
   In a flurry the entire thing is over and the audience, a little stunned, are left to watch their film...     

Ulysses Black wrote, directed and performed in this production

All words and images on www.ulyssesblack.com copyright 2014.