Award-winning Theatre Company Kandinsky bring The Winston Centre to the Weston Studio as part of their first UK tour.

Kandinsky Theatre Company announces that its acclaimed production of The Winston Machine will tour to Bristol Old Vic this spring, after a successful run in London last year.
 
At the height of the Blitz, Charlotte’s in a passionate affair with a Spitfire pilot, fighting fascism in red lipstick and living each day like her last. Eighty years later, Charlotte’s granddaughter Becky is stuck in her hometown, singing old songs at other people’s weddings – dreaming of a better time.  The 1940s are more real to Becky than her life – but when an old friend moves back to town, will she be forced to face the present?
 
Told through one family’s history, The Winston Machine is about the UK’s obsession with the Second World War and how it has become one of our defining cultural myths. From the 1940s to the 2020s, the show asks how we collectively and individually come to live with what we inherit. It explores how nations are defined by the stories they tell about themselves, and what those stories are for the UK today.
 
The show is directed by James Yeatman (Persuasion, Royal Exchange; The Kid Stays in the Picture, Royal Court), with dramaturgy from Lauren Mooney, and was devised by Yeatman and Mooney alongside The Winston Machine’s original company: cast members Nathaniel Christian, Rachel-Leah Hosker and Hamish MacDougall, and associate director Segen Yosef. Now with a new cast for its UK tour, the show is performed by Elinor Crawley (The White Queen, BBC), Daniel Millar (House of Shades, Almeida Theatre) and Toyin Omari-Kinch (The Death of a Black Man, Hampstead Theatre). Design is by Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen; original music is by Zac Gvirtzman and sound design is by Kieran Lucas.
 
Lauren Mooney said : “The first proper work we did on this show was a socially distanced workshop back in summer 2020: two weeks and three actors, in the middle of a global pandemic, widespread economic uncertainty and the Black Lives Matter protests. This show came out of that moment – an attempt to grapple with national identity and the legacy of history in this country. We couldn’t be more excited to bring it to Bristol, the city that so iconically toppled Colston, a place so engaged with the same questions that plague the show: how do we live with history?”
 
Kandinsky is an award-winning company whose shows have been seen in London (New Diorama Theatre), Manchester (Royal Exchange Theatre) and Oxford (The North Wall), as well as transferring internationally, but this is the company’s first UK tour and first visit to Bristol.
 
The Winston Machine 2023 tour is produced by Kandinsky in association with New Diorama Theatre, and co-produced by Dartington Trust. It has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and is also made with support from the Thistle Trust, Complicité, New Diorama Theatre, Old Diorama Arts Centre and Theatre Arts at London Metropolitan University, with thanks to the National Theatre. It was originally commissioned and co-produced by the New Diorama Theatre, London, in 2022.