Se Gæst / The Guest – ARC, Stockton

Writer and choreographer: Anthony Lo Guidice

In a week when England hit the headlines thanks to Suella Braverman’s ham-fisted attempts to gatekeep nationality and identity, Se Gæst / The Guest provides a more satisfying exploration of culture and country.

An outwardly simple tale sees an amphibian child washed ashore in a storm to be greeted with bafflement, suspicion, acclaim, hatred and forbidden desire.

This is a richer brew than political posturing: England emerges in shards and fragments; a text drawn from ideas that came out of hours of workshops and dialogues with community groups across the country.

The effect is somewhat like a shattered mirror. Flashes and flickers of a lost past, shipbuilding to St Cuthbert, paganism and piety. Seductive nostalgia, “alchemy for the people without hope”. St George stripped bare, with echoes of Salome, lies sobbing under a tatty flag.

Choreographer Anthony Lo Giudice doesn’t lack for ambition. At times, it feels as if there is material enough for multiple shows here, crammed tightly into 80 minutes on stage. There’s a risk of sensory overload: shimmering, percussive music, old English poetry, sinuous choreographer of birth and rebirth, folk dance and capoeira-like combat sequences.

At it’s best, it’s mesmerising. The show opens with Jerusalem picked out on wineglasses, a virtuoso performance from percussionist Brendan Murphy. An unofficial national anthem becomes an ethereal thing, rediscovering the mysticism of Blake’s text, while dancers slide and writhe over each other, eel-like coiling and uncoiling as man and myth is born and dies. The song fades, percussion conjures up a storm, Murphy begins to declaim an old English verse of mermaid and May Queen. Ir Com Angelrynn, I am England. The juxtaposition of ancient language and contemporary dance is spinetingling.

The narrative unfolds via echoes of other tales. Jonah meets Captain Ahab, a creature is fished from the waves looking as A’aful queer as the Lambton Worm – or, from a Middlesbrough choreographer, perhaps its Tees cousin the Sockburn Worm. Our amphibian is by turns Christ-like, a martyred monarch and a Morris dancer (as part of Lo Giudice’s exploration of dance, he is also a member of a Morris side; hankies are waved in this performance).

This, perhaps, is where the charge of “too much” comes in. At times, the sheer breadth of ideas is overwhelming. It takes the steady, wry narration of Caroline Reece to help us stay in touch with the explosion of thought onstage.

And it’s Reece whose tarot-toting character wraps up the show. Her closing monologue touches on an obscure beetle found – increasingly rarely – only on Lundy, that mysterious Bristol Channel Island intoned in the Shipping Forecast. It’s a reminder of impermanence, the inevitability of change and the impossibility of living in yesterday. The message: if we are all just passing through, that can only mean we are all The Guest.

Reviewed on 3rd October 2026. Touring the UK