Oblivious audience members heading to Sadler’s Wells East this month might be forgiven for thinking they’d taken a wrong turn into a bridal shop. Physical theatre company Gecko takes over the stage at the end of January with The Wedding, a beautiful clash of languages and cultures — featuring many, many wedding dresses.
The show is Gecko’s seventh touring production and explores “the complexities of human nature: the struggle between love and anger.” This struggle is one the company’s artistic director and founder, Amit Lahav, knows all too well.
The Wedding in its existing form has been roughly a decade in the making and began to take shape in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum. “I had no idea what it was we were making in year one”, Lahav told East End Review.
“At that very beginning [...] I know that I felt quite angry, or disillusioned, frustrated, with the feeling that our state, our country, was reneging on something very fundamental.
“At the time I remember that there was talk of dipping into the real fundamentals of a social contract — even our human rights were being discussed, tampered with. I think a lot of artists were feeling the build-up to that”, he added.
“In year two, or maybe towards the end of year two, something started to emerge. I thought, ‘Okay, here's a moment that I think I recognise [something] very significant’”.
The resulting production is set in a dystopian world in which everyone is “married to the state”. “The Wedding uses the ritual of marriage as a metaphor for adulthood and the social contract that we all seem to be pulled into”, Lahav said.
“The characters are spat out onto the stage, they get given a wedding dress, before they know it, they're in the machinery of working life”.
But the show is anything but critical of marriage. “When I started to research marriage and weddings, it was a really beautiful, very open idea”, Lahav told us.
“It was, ‘Tell me about marriage ritual and ceremony in Mexico. How does it work, what exactly happens’? Or, ‘What’s exactly the process in Nigeria, what goes on’? You then have this tapestry of very unusual things. [...] and it’s just this everlasting theatrical sequencing.
“Somewhere along the way, a lot of this thought became really not about marriage, but more about divorce. And lo and behold, as we opened the show in Newcastle, Brexit started. Suddenly we're making a show about divorce, and here we are”.
Born in Israel, Lahav grew up in London and trained as a performer, working with industry heavyweights such as Lindsay Kemp — who was also a mentor to the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie — and David Glass.
“At some point I knew I had to start making my own work”, he told East End Review. “I didn't actually know I was making a company, necessarily, at the beginning, but I was. And Gecko was born”.
Now, 25 years on, the theatre company has performed internationally as well as at London institutions such as the National to the Barbican. For Lahav, the chance to work at Sadler’s Wells East — which itself opened less than a year ago — for the first time is an opportunity for the show to be reborn.
“Something happened a couple of years ago, where the ecology of touring in the UK crashed”, he added. I thought, ‘I wonder whether this is the moment when The Wedding becomes the thing that it always could have become. [...] This is the moment to strip it all down to just the sort of bare essentials of the piece’.
“[Sadler’s Wells East is] a really deep space, which is really cool because it means that I can use its depth, the darkness of its depth, to help me create some of the images that I'm really excited about creating.
“To be at a new venue, to be connecting with young people, is, at this time, really important”.
Equally important to the piece is language — though not in the way you’d expect. “Words are extraordinarily powerful in the theatre. They are the thing that becomes the anchor”, Lahav told East End Review. “And we don't have that.
“Everyone's speaking [a different] mother tongue, so you have about 15 spoken languages in the show, and they're relevant, but they're not decisively important to the storytelling”. Instead, this mix of languages adds “a really important texture to the characters”, Lahav added.
Vanessa, one of the characters, speaks in Nahuatl — a language native to the Aztecs. Meanwhile, Sophie is inspired by the anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl, who was part of the White Rose resistance group in Germany in the early 1940s. She was beheaded for treason at the age of just 21 over her involvement in the movement.
“She had few things that are recorded [that she said]”, said Lahav. “When [Sophie the character] talks to the audience, she says some of the words that Sophie Scholl said”.
He added: “I'm really excited about it, actually. I'm really I'm really looking forward to getting my teeth into the piece [again]”.
The Wedding is on at Sadler’s Wells East from 21 – 24 January, 2026. Tickets can be found here.
