Period Drama at Lowry

Is there a point where anxiety stops feeling purely internal and starts to feel like a reasonable response to the world around us – with all its political, economic and social volatility? Period Drama, a surreal dark comedy by Olga Kaleta, begins with this question.

Drawing on her own experiences of chronic anxiety, Kaleta builds a show that unfolds in discrete episodes, veering between autobiographical reflection and something altogether stranger. Slasher film tropes, raw bodily imagery and an absurdist detour into the life cycle of insects are folded into the mix, the disorientating effect mirroring the instability it describes. Meanwhile, circus and physical theatre techniques keep it grounded in the body as much as the mind.

In Kaleta’s own words, Period Drama pushes back against the idea that mental wellbeing is about self-care and resilience alone; the bigger picture is often missed. The piece asks what happens when fear is not just internal, but social – shaped by the conditions we live within. Working through a feminist lens, it reframes mental health as something entangled with both identity and politics: messy, unstable and always in flux.

That thinking runs through the show’s imagery, where cycles – menstrual, biological, cinematic – become a way of exploring change over time. Rather than offering a clear trajectory from crisis to recovery, Period Drama seems more interested in contradiction: in learning to live with uncertainty, and in holding onto hope even when transformation is slow, partial or invisible.

With integrated British Sign Language by Sherrie Eugene-Hart woven into the fabric of the performance, the work expands beyond spoken text. Here, BSL operates not only as access but as an additional artistic language, placing another presence alongside Kaleta on stage and opening up new ways of expressing the inner and outer worlds the piece navigates.

Absurd, funny and politically alert, Period Drama offers a complex response to a simple idea: that our inner lives are entangled with the times in which we live.