Stray Dogs

Stray Dogs is a visceral epic play rooted in the past and entangled in nature and superstition. What would you risk to make your world a better place?

Tommo Fowler directs Theo Chester’s potent new work, Stray Dogs, a haunting and resonant debut play where death and healing collide in the strange world of Jacob, a troubled yet compassionate executioner who longs for a better future and a different life.

It’s been a harsh winter. Outside the city walls, people are starving. Inside, the rich townspeople hoard their grain and gold. Like his father before him, Jacob must serve the elite and keep those who steal in order. He fixes their broken bones, sews up their wounds, and then chops off their heads.

Jacob believes he will keep the peace better through solely healing, but he desperately needs the town’s blessing. Little does he know that others close to him have far more radical plans for change.

Theo Chester’s bold, inventive play examines hope, fear and our instinctive need to do better in a challenging and difficult world.
The cast includes Graham Butler (Jacob), Abbey Gillett (Hilde), Graeme McKnight (Franz/Pig), Coral Wylie (Wilf) and Ruxandra Porojnicu (Ana).

Theo Chester is a playwright from London. He has been a member of Soho Theatre’s Writers’ Lab and Writers’ Alumni Group. Alongside writing, he has worked in film, assistant directing the feature documentary Summer in the Forest (2017). He also works as an English Teacher.

Theo says, ‘I find stories where characters wrestle with terrible decisions extremely compelling. I think it has a lot to do with my own worries: feelings of guilt, a desire to do the right thing, a fear of taking action and upsetting people. I studied Theology at university and did a course on the philosophy of punishment, which is where I first read about executioners.

‘The image of someone doing such a terrible, public-facing thing and then having to live with the shame and stigma of that really stuck with me. I then spent a lot of time not writing about executioners, but about lots of other things, but the image of a man on the gallows stayed with me and eventually I put some ideas down on paper and, well, here we are.

‘I hope people respond to the world of this play. I want them to feel enveloped by it and find it as compelling as I do. I want people to enjoy it. It is, I hope, a good story that will stay with them. Finally, I want the audience to feel hopeful at the end, to feel that even though it is a story where terrible things happen, there is a clear sense that we, each of us, have agency and the capacity to shift things in our society. This is hard but exciting, although not something that will solve everything overnight…but it is hopeful. I want people to feel hopeful…after watching a play about an executioner.’