Life’s a beach, and then we all die: LIFT festival returns with the remarkable ‘Sun & Sea’

Despite the ravages of the pandemic, surprisingly few major London theatre shows were scrapped as a result: venues like the National are still dutifully working through productions announced in 2020, or even earlier.

For Kris Nelson, the artistic director of the London International Festival of Theatre – aka LIFT – it was different. Having announced his inaugural programme for London’s biggest, boldest festival of global theatre on March 9 2020, he was forced to scrap the entire thing 11 days later.

‘It was totally devastating for us,’ he says. ‘There were so many moments I wanted to share with audiences. I knew that these artists were going to give people a lot of really treasured memories.’

The 2022 edition of the biennial festival is now upon us, the first since 2018.  But it’s a new programme: LIFT 2020 remains a ghost festival that existed on paper only.

It’s sad, but the right thing to do. None of the work was scrapped (it’s just that London didn’t get to see it). Nelson felt time had moved on.

‘​​A festival needs to offer us ways to engage and consider the times in which we live, and 2022 is a very different year from 2020,’ he says. ‘Artists in the line-up this year are giving audiences new ways of looking at the world and experiencing live performance.’

But one show dominates LIFT 2022. Made by an all-female creative team from Lithuania, ‘Sun & Sea’ is a durational opera set on a beach: that is to say, an artificial beach has to be made to accommodate it, and the show goes on for an extremely long time, with the same hour of performance ‘looped’ throughout the evening (audiences don’t need to stay longer than one hour). The show is a comment on human complacency in the face of climate change and came to notice when it took the top prize at the hugely prestigious 2019 Venice Biennale, where it blew Nelson away.

Days like this might not last much longer.

‘I only had a day in Venice and the work was at the top of my list of things to see,’ he says. ‘At first I thought: “Oh, it’s really cool”; then I thought: “Oh, it’s deeply clever”. Then the loop kept happening and I was so gripped. I thought: “Oh, this is our lives”. I stayed probably past my welcome and couldn’t tear myself away. I was just completely astonished and, in the middle of a little square in Venice, I burst into tears. I had seen an artwork of staggering beauty, deep complexity, huge humour and generosity, and I was so, so, so very moved. We had to get it to London.’

There are other cool works at the festival: notably ‘Radio Ghost’, a headphones-based spectre hunt through a series of London shopping centres, and ‘The Making of Pinocchio’, an intimate trans narrative. But ‘Sun & Sea’ is the main attraction and the reason there are relatively few other shows this year: converting Deptford’s Albany arts centre into a beach populated by opera singers is actually a pretty expensive process. ‘Sun & Sea’ uses more than ten tonnes of sand and makes use of more than a hundred local volunteers to act asm non-singing beachgoers. But Nelson absolutely believes in the work, and to that end, he’s turned LIFT 2022 into a giant vehicle for it.

‘This is a show that lets you see life unfold,’ he enthuses. ‘We’re seeing a day on the beach and, while the premise seems so simple, underneath is also an alarm. Days like this might not last much longer.’

For those who love to see shows that are world-renowned and that are moving the art and theatre world and shaping what performance can be, this one is for you too.’

‘Sun & Sea’ is at the Albany, Jun 23-Jul 10.