There is a moment in most nights out when the evening still appears capable of becoming anything. (Isn't there? Is it just me?)
Nobody's missed the last train. Nobody's said the unforgivable thing. The bottle isn't yet empty and tomorrow morning remains sufficiently distant to be somebody else’s problem.
That precarious moment sits at the heart of (Bring Me the Head of the) Disco King, a new play written by Liverpool-based writer Mason Guthrie and brought to the stage by Ladderman Collective.
Its ingredients initially sound like the beginning of a familiar, chaotic night: one hotel room, one bed, one bottle of Prosecco, two girls and two boys. Jenny, Amy, Jason and Neil have three apparent objectives - get hammered, get lucky and make it a night to remember.
As the hours pass, though, an evening intended to provide escape becomes something more complicated. The production asks what happens when impulsive choices acquire consequences, and how certain moments continue to live inside us long after everybody's left the party.
The play will receive its first full production at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre on 27 and 28 November 2026, following an in-development reading at the same venue earlier this year. It then travels to the King’s Arms in Salford on 6 December.
For Ladderman Collective, the Liverpool performances are more than a convenient opening point. The new theatre company has been built in the city by young creatives who trained at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and have chosen to make their work in the place where they now live. And is home.
That matters.
Every year, Northern drama schools, universities and conservatoires produce actors, writers, directors, musicians, designers and technicians with the skills to contribute to the country’s cultural life. The persistent question is whether they will find the stages, money and professional networks that allow them to remain in the North - or conclude that a serious career must begin somewhere else.
Ladderman Collective’s answer is to start making the work themselves.
Guthrie, the company’s Artistic Director, has spent the past year developing Disco King with a local creative team. Stuart Crowther directs, with Joseph Mihranian, Lilly Schmeda, Alivia Yemm and Connor Burns forming the four-person cast.
The production is also going to have an original soundtrack written by Benjamin B Thomas and developed and performed by musicians Dan Napper and Louis Williams, both recent LIPA graduates. Music's not being added as decoration to a story about a night out; it's being created as part of the world these young theatre-makers are constructing together. Isn't that amazing?
There's something fantastically direct about the whole endeavour. This is a new company staging a new play, with a young cast and locally made music, in front of the city that has helped bring its members together. It's an act of collaboration, but also of confidence.
The title carries an unmistakable echo of David Bowie, yet Guthrie’s Disco King doesn't appear to promise any nostalgic glamour. The action is compressed into a single room and approximately 70 minutes. Rather than presenting the party as liberation without cost, the play stays behind to examine the emotional debris.
That makes its territory recognisable well beyond one Liverpool hotel room. Most people understand the dangerous alchemy of exhaustion, alcohol, desire and the need to appear untroubled in front of friends. Young adulthood is full of evenings in which everybody is performing a version of themselves - funnier, braver, less frightened and more certain than they really feel.
What begins as blowing off steam can expose loyalties, resentments and vulnerabilities that've been waiting for an opportunity to surface. A night becomes “one to remember” for reasons nobody intended.
Unity describes the play as funny, sharp and emotionally complex. That combination is going to be essential. Moral consequence without humour can quickly become instruction; chaos without consequence becomes merely another party. The promising space is between the two: allowing these four young characters to be reckless, ridiculous, frightened and human at the same time.
There's also a rather fab symmetry in the production returning to Unity after its earlier developmental reading. As we keep banging on about here; new theatre, or art or music, or anything, rarely arrives fully formed. It's tested aloud, altered, questioned and rebuilt through the work of actors, directors and audiences. The November premiere represents not just an opening night, but a year of a young company learning what its play needs to become.
For MagNorth, that process is worth supporting. The North doesn't only need large productions arriving with established names and national marketing campaigns. It needs small companies prepared to take risks on original writing. It needs venues that give them a first room, audiences willing to encounter unfamiliar work and cultural coverage that notices people before success makes them impossible to overlook. This team of people have pulled all those constituent parts together.
Ladderman Collective is at the beginning of a journey. There will be time later for verdicts. For now, there is real value in seeing a group of young artists claim their place in Liverpool’s theatrical life - and put a complicated, funny and unsettling night of their own invention onstage.
The party, after all, is the easy part.
The interesting question is what everybody does when the lights come up.
(Bring Me the Head of the) Disco King is at Unity Theatre, Liverpool on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 November 2026 at 7.30pm.
The production visits the King’s Arms, Salford, on Sunday 6 December 2026 at 7.30pm. Book Manchester tickets.
