Lost Dog and Lucy Kirwood - Like Rabbits.

 A short story by Virginia Woolf provides the inspiration for a new dance-theatre piece on love and loss to be shown at London’s home of contemporary dance, The Place. 

On a night in a city a man and a woman meet and have sex and fall deeply in love.

Each night the lovers slip away from their real lives and disappear into a world that exists only in their shared imagination. A world in which they are not their normal selves, but King of the Rabbits and Queen of the Hares. But what begins as a game soon becomes a battleground, and the couple hurtle towards a tragedy of the quietest, saddest and most ordinary type.

This is the simple, yet profoundly moving plot of Virginia Woolf’s short story, Lappin and Lapinova , which has now been adapted to the stage as Like Rabbits .

The adaptation is the work of  playwright Lucy Kirkwood (whose multi-award winning play Chimerica was one of THE West End hits of the season) and choreographer/dancer Ben Duke, with his company Lost Dog.

Duke himself will dance Lappin partnered by the Greek dancer Ino Riga as Lapinova.

When Like Rabbits premiered at the Brighton Festival earlier this year, some critics found it so affecting they felt it had penetrated the very essence of Woolf’s short story. Here’s Lynn Gardner in The Guardian: “b y exploring the couple's inner lives, it accesses deeper meanings in Woolf's original story.”

Lucy Kirkwood has been fascinated by the original story since she first read it as a teenager, but was careful to use few words for the stage adaptation, instead accepting the motto of the Lost Dog company:   ‘say what needs to be said and dance the rest. ’  

Like Rabbits is, of course, a performance about a performance, in that the characters themselves immerse themselves in a game that involves role-playing; and this, in Lynn Gardner’s word, means ‘ Like Rabbits feels very different from most page-to-stage adaptations, not just because of its dance vocabulary but in the way it plays on the performative nature the story's central relationship.”

For his part, Ben Duke sees the work as one with almost universal appeal.  In an interview earlier this year he said, Like Rabbits is ‘a story anyone in a long term relationship that has broken down will recognise.’