Rimini Protokoll: Best Before

Following its debut at Push Festival, Rimini Protokoll's Best Before arrives at the ICA this summer for its London Premiere. In true Protokoll style, audience and practioner collaborate to create a unique experience that endlessly and engagingly cross the tracks of the real and the imagined.

Best Before pulls the multi-player video game out of the virtual realm and plugs it into an intimate theatre setting. Each audience member navigates an anonymous avatar via a gaming pad, to interact with a panel of on-stage experts - an electronic artist, a game tester, a politician and a traffic flagger. As audience and panel clash, collude, remonstrate, a simulated city, BestLand, gradually develops. Taking its inspiration from Vancouver's gaming industry, BestLand lives and dies through a decision making process that encompasses the personal, social and political.

The Canadian based company, Rimini Protokoll creates theatre of Münchausian escapades, presenting distinctive works that feature non-actors, or rather "experts in daily life", and has attracted wide-spread acclaim throughout Europe for their often disconcerting, always inspiring works that tread a fine line between the fact and fiction.

"Rimini Protokoll brings real life to the stage in a way that no other theatre form has been able to. The unmistakable strength of these performances lies above all in the fact...that life could gain the upper hand, and theatre could lose control over itself." - Frankfurter Rundschau