Museum Hours

  Expecting a gore fest of violence, degradation and societal breakdown? Instead we have a completely immersive social realist drama with rounded, fully recognisable people. Just people from 250 years ago. The Gallows Poll pulls off the extraordinarily hard trick of meshing (rather than mashing) language which conveys both a sense of the period but also the feeling that these are people like us.   The result is unique in achieving a kind of demotic drama that is true to experience but does not fetishise authenticity or worry about mixing modern and period language and terminology. Somehow it’s both of the time and universal to the experience of common people.  And it's vivid and funny (so very, very funny), and touching and ridiculous. A world which we enter in media res with no guardrails and just a requirement to pick up the cadence and the rhythm of what is happening. To just listen to these people talk. And how they talk. The dialogue and the delivery are amazing. The verbal sp