Seeds of time

choice

Its characters include a psychiatrist who produces food from her cleavage, a blind surrealist painter from the 1920s, and a man who is obsessed with his laptop and shows evangelical tendencies. Sharon Kennet's latest play, Seed, for her company, Praxis Theatre, stretches the audience's imagination almost to its limits. "I started off with ideas about love, death and sex - you know, little things like that," explains Kennett. "These characters are the different personifications of those things which I'm exploring in parallel worlds." Each actor will play two parallel characters, and the performance will be in traverse, with mirrors on each side of the stage. This historical time-travelling and juggling with identity is not new to Praxis. Their last production, Dot, explored two women, one stuck in contemporary suburbia, the other a Renaissance lady dabbling in witchcraft. For that production, Kennett employed the services of magician Fay Presto and illusionist John Gordon; in Seed, some of those techniques will be used to create the lush images which are a hallmark of the company's work. It may be confusing, but Seed will certainly not be dreary.

'Seed' opens at the Lyric Studio on 31 May (0181-741 2311)