Brighton Festival 2026
Time Keeps The Drummer
Fevered Sleep
Genre: Experimental, Family
Venue: Brighton Corn Exchange
Festival: Brighton Festival
Low Down
Compared to many artforms – I’m thinking painting, sculpture, even music and dance – theatre is a very timelocked medium. It lends itself to narrative, beginning-middle-end structures, and if it is to explore thoroughly the concept of time itself, it must somehow fight against its own instincts, break its own bonds. Fevered Sleep’s brave, genre-defying masterpiece Time Keeps The Drummer manages to do just that.
Review
A white stage, its back wall hung with letters on hooks, spelling out words. Loss, history, conceptual, whisper, decay, death. More and more words are added as the hours roll by.
In a box set into this wall sits Matthew Moore, drumming. Well, is he drumming? He has drumsticks, which he thrashes with abandon, but… there’s no drumkit. Or is there? In my hand, I hold a Silent Disco headset, entrusted to me by FoH. I slip it over my ears. OMG, he is drumming! Perhaps invisible drumkits triggered by motion sensors in the sticks are all the rage these days, but I’m old and have never seen something so cool.
A projection screen shows animals, and sometimes babies, sleeping. There are two doorways, hung with gold disco curtains, one way in, one way out. But for whom? Who is to come and explore this empty space, populate it with words, ideas, characters and motifs? Who best to provoke us into pontificating upon the nature of the Universe’s great ticking clock? Why, a bunch of kids, of course.
It’s a risk! I have tried to lead children of this age in enough longform, experimental improvisations to know how easily such endeavours can descend into any number of things except worthwhile entertainment. But I am delighted to report that this particular bunch of twelve kids are, without exception, brilliant. There isn’t a weak link among them. Annabelle Joy, Beatrice McQuillan, Bruno Acford Evans, Cadu Liebmann Simioni, Emma-Louise Labbe Rosset, Jack Smith Laine, Maeve Black, Maya Sabaliauskaite, Meredith Whiteley-Jones, Pearl Ragucos, Ptolemy Williams, Zachary Jewson – I salute and applaud you all.
There are plenty of rules in this playspace, rules that it takes a while for us as an audience to appreciate: spacing rules, causal rules, strict parameters governing allowable movement qualities, even strict ways of treating the anatomical skeleton prop. And all twelve who walk here are utterly committed and unwavering in their adherence to these rules, because they know that therein lies utter and unbounded freedom of expression and abstraction.
The stand-out moments are the improvised dialogues, where two actors engage in conversation. Sometimes they wear wigs and moustaches, and spoof adult characters whose jobs depend on a keen rigour to timekeeping – shout out in particular to the terrific girl who played the train station controller this evening, pure comedy gold. Sometimes, they are merely themselves; there was one incredible, occasionally tortuous philosophical debate that meandered hither and thither and considered questions such as whether there could ever have been a beginning to time because surely it would take time to make time in the first place, but that would mean time already existed, and… and the mind boggles.
And all the while, the drummer keeps drumming, but only if you put the headphones on. He is the production’s pulse, but the children are its heart. It is the heart that keeps the pulse going; the time that keeps the drummer.
My two daughters, aged 9 and 6, were completely rapt. They devoured every moment, could scarce be torn away for our curry house date round the corner, and begged to be allowed back in once our taste buds were quenched. And because Time Keeps The Drummer is a durational piece lasting an astonishing five hours, we could do just that. In total, we caught the middle hour+, and the final half hour, and I honestly could have stayed all night.
It is rare and exceedingly refreshing to see theatre that trusts children – both onstage and in the audience – with ideas this big, and with theatrical forms this leftfield. This piece is a bold experiment, and one that absolutely works. I am reawakened to the mysteries of life and to the possibilities of art. I have found my new favourite company.
