For two weeks in February 2009, the labyrinthine Shunt Lounge hosted the Holiday Cycle, a collaboration between the Heritage Arts Company, folk musician Johnny Flynn and a wealth of talented artists. Part-installation, part-play, part-gig, the show chronicled Everyman’s discovery of his own mortality and his role in the cycle of death and re-creation.

Led by trainee tourguide Tony and his loquacious wheelman James through the six days of creation, the audience witnessed an apparent mutiny, a violent but beautiful murder, and a subsequent resurrection into a world of mystic removal men, leaving all concerned with a momentary intensifying of the baffled bewilderment in which we mere mortals are forced to live. Waterbombs were provided to lighten the mood when this became too much to bear. Taking as its starting point medieval literature, oral tradition and narrative music, the Holiday Cycle combined numerous design and performance elements to tell the story of a story in an atmospheric location in an innovative style.