Or You Could Kiss Me

A new play by Neil Bartlett and Handspring Puppet Company. Directed by Neil Bartlett and designed by Rae Smith.

In the winter of 2036, in a shabby apartment in Port Elizabeth, two old men search for a way to say goodbye after a lifetime spent together. In the perfect summer of 1971, in a very different South Africa, their handsome younger selves search for the courage to fall in love. And poised halfway between these two stories – one imagined, one remembered – their real-life counterparts bear witness to both the beginning and ending of an incredible journey.

Neil Bartlett returns to the National in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company and designer Rae Smith to create a fierce and tender meditation on love, memory and the power of the unspoken. Using a bare stage, a handful of domestic props and the astonishing puppetry that is Handspring’s trademark, this is an intimate history of two very private lives, lived in extraordinary times.