Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel

A Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Production

Co-directed by Karl James and Andy Smith / Composition and sound design by Pippa Murphy / Lighting consultation by Laura Watkins

“And that’s the moment when I leave. The moment when the jokes fail us.”

Not here but in another place. In another place the country is being torn apart. Not in this place, remember, but in that other place the leader has lost control, people are being killed, someone is blinded. But not here, you understand, not in this theatre here. Not this one. Here, everything’s just fine. Everything’s hilarious.

The Fool leaves King Lear before the blinding. Before the killing starts. Before the ice creams in the interval.

In this new solo work, Tim Crouch draws on ideas of virtual reality to send the Fool back to the future of the play he left. Back to a world without moral leadership or integrity; a world where wealth covers vice; where the poor are dehumanised; where the jokes fall flat.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a daringly unaccommodated piece of theatre that switches between scathingly funny stand-up and an audacious act of collective imagining. It is an adult take on the atomised world we live in now. King Lear meets stand-up meets the metaverse.

“Crouch is a master storyteller for our times”  – The Scotsman