Brighton Year-Round 2026

To help them get through interminable service shifts, Lia Burge and her colleague Sophie record conversations and snide remarks on till roll. Little notes revealing the life history of regulars at the cafe, or the privileged life-style of guests at a swanky (on the surface at least) dinner dance. It’s this digging at truth that makes Crying Into Bins so instantly affecting.

With her poet’s ear for the lyrical and writer’s nose for a story, Lia tells of long nights suffering the insults of those who barely notice her existence; “I’m the human table, my biceps are more than able” she quips, asked to pour champagne while balancing five plates on one arm.

Collated over 20 years working in a variety of roles, the scenarios vary from the chummy pub bar to upmarket parties of canapes and champers. She reaches peak servitude at a Margaret Thatcher Memorial Dinner, where one woman’s job is to keep the Union Jack flapping for five hours. The repetition of pulling pints and popping corks becomes a stand-out dance sequence. Switching tone and shape it’s an assured performance that could easily hold more physicality on a bigger stage.

All this is told, hypothetically, from the bottom of a commercial food waste bin, with occasional slurpy plops of food being dumped on her. We’re assured this isn’t a metaphor for the hospitality industry as a whole, but I once served fancy snacks and drinks to preening tech-bro’s on an American yacht and felt like I was being dumped on throughout.

What comes over most strongly is the camaraderie between colleagues, the fun they can muster from work that drains them mentally and physically. Work that lacks financial reward or recognition yet underpins contemporary lifestyles for many. Lia is one of thousands, often from far overseas, who keep kitchens and restaurants functioning but remain faceless to those who benefit. Whether true or invented, characters and anecdotes feel real and we hope Sophie pulled through. There’s passion and pain, poetry and cursing through the midnight hours shovelling left-overs in the back alley. In Europe hospitality is seen far more as a profession; just watch the bar staff in an Irish pub lining up pints knowing exactly who wants what. Here it’s a temporary fix, people come and go. Those who last scrape a living. Lia faces ageing on the ‘below stairs’ crew with understandable rage, but also humanity and acerbic wit. As we approach the Christmas office party season, bear a thought for those preparing a mountain of brussels sprouts, only to cast them soggy and exhausted into the dump bin.

The penultimate date on a UK tour, tonight is a home gig in the venue where Lia first performed with Hammer and Tongue, Brighton’s long-running poetry slam outfit. Leanne Shorley’s bravura scatological descriptive rhymes and the political, vibrant word-play of Romanian poet Thea Lungu launch a night serious in intent, hilarious in delivery.