imitating the dog, one of the UK’s most original and innovative theatre companies is set to push their inventive storytelling to new heights when they visit the Lowry with their bold contemporary retelling of H.G Wells’s iconic science fiction tale The War of the Worlds.
Four performers enter the stage and construct an epic road movie before our eyes.
It’s a story we know or think we know – an apocalyptic tale of alien invasion and the unfolding destruction of everything we hold dear. Extraterrestrial lifeforms land from the skies. Lines of Brits scrabble to flee across the channel while their cities and towns lie in smouldering ruins. It’s all of our worst nightmares.
What would you do if order broke down? What would you do to survive? How far would you go to protect your own?
Using miniature environments, model worlds, camera tricks and projection, imitating the dog mix the live and the recorded, the animate and the inanimate to create a thrilling, audacious and timely retelling of H. G. Wells’s classic novel.
Andrew Quick, Co-Director and Artistic Director of imitating the dog said: “I am so excited to be working on our adaptation of War of the Worlds. It’s a great story, and its themes of paranoia, moral panic, technological and ecological catastrophe, and the ways in which society implodes when faced with crisis, seem so relevant to today.
It’s a story of immense intensity and adapting the novel produces some difficult challenges. We are testing our technological and storytelling skills to the limit but producing some amazing sequences that do justice to the novel, but which also connect to contemporary concerns.
We have been exploring how to combine live green screen acting with miniature model worlds to create a live movie that is created in front of the audience. Imagine a detailed model of a destroyed city: you see a performer operate a camera that moves through its devastated buildings. At the same time, in another part of the stage, you see a live performer being filmed and the image of their performance is then projected into the city landscape, so you see them looking out of one of the windows in one of its burnt-out buildings. This interlacing of the live and the miniature, the real and the model, is a new direction for us, but it creates some stunning effects.
And we need these effects to create the extraordinary, compelling, and epic story that we are telling – all with just four performers. Of all productions across 27 years of theatre making, this is the most ambitious and technologically challenging work that we have made. I really can’t wait to see how audiences react.”
LISTINGS
25-28 February -Lowry, Salford Quays
Age recommendation: 14+
Post Show Discussion by Emma Howard | Wed 25 Feb 2026
