How Are You Feeling?

A new play
written by Fin Kennedy,
Devised by Richard Hahlo, Fin Kennedy, Ellie Jones and Jem Wall.
Directed by Ellie Jones.

In development for 2012-13

A devastating new promenade play about life, death and the ultimate choice.

Hydrocracker teams up with award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy to bring a darkly comic dystopian vision crashing into a hospital near you.

Choice.

It’s the 21st century buzzword of the new NHS. But what does it really mean? And can any of us predict where our accumulated choices will lead?

Just like the NHS, this new play puts choice at its heart, casting the audience as characters in the tale, and allowing them to exercise free will to determine their own journey through the story – and through the real hospital in which the drama unfolds.

A future, just one notch away from our present. Economic chaos, food riots and blackouts are an everyday reality. An embattled NHS is forced to make harsh choices about who to treat. But one maverick consultant, in one pioneering hospital, thinks he has an answer. A new drug. A drug so revolutionary that it won’t just cure you – it might actually herald the next stage in human evolution … but at a terrible cost. Welcome to the world of Reversatrol. Casting the audience as either Patients or Doctors, How Are You Feeling? offers the audience a choice at every stage. They will be probed, tested and diagnosed – or trained up to do so on one another. Some will be treated, some will not. How they will react is their choice. But all will eventually be confronted with the consequences of their decisions, and in the end have to make the ultimate choice: unleash Reversatrol into the world, or destroy it – and themselves – forever.

The play’s ending will be different every night. Using live theatre, multimedia technology and sensory art installation inside a working hospital, How Are You Feeling? is the ultimate invitation to the dark side.

The piece will take site-specific theatre to the next level.

Fin Kennedy is a multi-award-winning playwright whose work includes How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, the shock winner of the 2006 John Whiting Award, now being produced around the world (“One of our hottest young dramatists” The Guardian).