Mr Burns - A Post-Electric Play

It's the end of everything in contemporary America

A future without power

But what will survive?

Mr Burns asks how the stories we tell make us the people we are

Exploding the boundaries between pop and high culture

And - when society has crumbled - imagines the future for America's most famous family

The Simpsons

REVIEWS

"Mr Burns is a brilliantly lucid bit of theatre. There's some additional fun if you are very familiar with The Simpsons but that's not vital, in fact, it's a distraction if you think it's all an in-joke for the fans. It could be anything; The Simpsons stands in for any story that embraces and touches a whole culture. It is The Bible, The Iliad, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and as such it's a challenge to how we think of art, religion, culture, the whole way of life that we move in. It's beautifully performed, too, because if it had been given a smooth, elegant London theatre production, it would have missed the point. This is a rough, crude, funny, clever, heartfelt, stupid evening of theatre and I can't recommend it highly enough" ~ Dan Rebellato

'Washburn's play is pretty out there in many respects, but each scenario is beautifully realised, and it presents a compelling query: faced with uncertainty, would we salvage what's 'important' for the human race? Or what comforts us? And is there really a difference? the bold vistas of Washburn's imagination are thrillingly provocative in themselves its message is ultimately a comforting one: just like cockroaches and Twinkies, theatre and stories will survive the end of days, no matter how strangely" ~ Time Out

"Anne Washburn's downright brilliant "Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play" has arrived to leave you dizzy with the scope and dazzle of its ideas" ~ The NY Times

"The play is both scary and sweet, funny but dead serious, unique and wonderfully theatrical" ~ TIME Magazine

"Get in line ASAP. This bizarre, funny, bleak, wonderful show is even better than its hype" ~ New York Post

"Gradually this absurd, unreal performance comes to encapsulate not just the old, now-mythical way of life but also our own. The intellectual fascination of the material meshes with emotional significance on an instinctual level" ~ Financial Times

"If you're a fan of The Simpsons with an appetite for risk-taking theatre, its strangeness will be irresistible" ~ Evening Standard