Award-winning Imitating The Dog to bring retelling of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to Salford’s Lowry from 25–28 February

Imitating the dog, one of the UK’s most original and innovative theatre companies is set to push their inventive storytelling to new heights when they visit Lowry with their bold contemporary retelling of H.G Wells’s iconic science fiction tale The War of the Worlds.

Created by imitating the dog, War of the Worlds will be at Lowry from Wednesday 25^th to Saturday 28th February.

Four performers enter the stage and construct an epic road movie before our eyes.

It’s a story we know or think we know – an apocalyptic tale of alien invasion and the unfolding destruction of everything we hold dear. Extraterrestrial lifeforms land from the skies. Lines of Brits scrabble to flee across the channel while their cities and towns lie in smouldering ruins. It’s all of our worst nightmares.

What would you do if order broke down? What would you do to survive? How far would you go to protect your own?

Using miniature environments, model worlds, camera tricks and projection, imitating the dog mix the live and the recorded, the animate and the inanimate to create a thrilling, audacious and timely retelling of H. G.  Wells’s classic novel.

War of the Worlds’ cast will feature Bonnie Baddoo (All of Us, Royal National Theatre and Alex Rider, Eleventh Hour Films), Morgan Bailey (Night of the Living Dead™ – Remix, imitating the dog and SAS: Rogue Heroes, BBC), Gareth Cassidy (Marvellous, @sohoplace and The Card, Claybody Theatre and New Vic Theatre) and Amy Dunn (Edward II, Royal Shakespeare Company and Hushabye Mountain, Hope Mill Theatre).

Following their acclaimed adaptations of literary classics Heart of Darkness (2018), Dracula (2021), Macbeth (2023) and Frankenstein (2024), imitating the dog are set to push their creative storytelling to new heights.

Andrew Quick, Co-Director and Artistic Director of imitating the dog said: “I am so excited to be working on our adaptation of War of the Worlds. It’s a great story, and its themes of paranoia, moral panic, technological and ecological catastrophe, and the ways in which society implodes when faced with crisis, seem so relevant to today.

It’s a story of immense intensity and adapting the novel produces some difficult challenges. We are testing our technological and storytelling skills to the limit but producing some amazing sequences that do justice to the novel, but which also connect to contemporary concerns.

We have been exploring how to combine live green screen acting with miniature model worlds to create a live movie that is created in front of the audience. Imagine a detailed model of a destroyed city: you see a performer operate a camera that moves through its devastated buildings. At the same time, in another part of the stage, you see a live performer being filmed and the image of their performance is then projected into the city landscape, so you see them looking out of one of the windows in one of its burnt-out buildings. This interlacing of the live and the miniature, the real and the model, is a new direction for us, but it creates some stunning effects.

And we need these effects to create the extraordinary, compelling, and epic story that we are telling – all with just four performers. Of all productions across 27 years of theatre making, this is the most ambitious and technologically challenging work that we have made. I really can’t wait to see how audiences react.”

imitating the dog have been making ground-breaking work for theatres and other spaces for 27 years. Their work, which fuses live performance with digital technology, has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people in venues, outdoor festivals, and events across the world. Past productions have included Hotel Methuselah, A Farewell to Arms, Heart of Darkness, Night of The Living Dead ™- Remix, the award-winning Dracula: The Untold Story, Frankenstein, and most recently, All Blood Runs Red. In 2022 the company staged Cinema Inferno, a ground-breaking new show for the Parisian haute couture house Maison Margiela, based on an original concept by creative director John Galliano, for Maison Margiela’s Artisanal 2022 collection, presented on the official Paris Haute Couture Calendar.

War of the Worlds is supported by Lancaster Arts and Cast, Doncaster

The War of the Worlds plays at The Lowry, Salford 25-28 February. Tickets are available here.