Director Daisy Evans’ concept focuses on society’s obsession with true crime as a ‘faceless digital army’.
In approaching The Hive through a Brechtian lens, my intention is to create a critical distance that allows the audience to confront the reality of Fred and Rose West’s crimes without being consumed by grief or seduced into voyeurism.Rather than immersing the audience in psychological realism or sensationalism, the staging uses techniques of estrangement – direct address, visible theatricality, disruption of narrative flow – to keep the focus on structural questions of power, complicity, and social neglect.
The aim is not to replicate the horror of the acts themselves, but to provoke reflection on how such atrocities were enabled, overlooked, and embedded in a wider context. By resisting spectacle, the production creates space for audiences to engage intellectually and ethically.”
