“During her performance piece History History History, which screened on the Thursday night of this year’s Flatpack Festival, moving image artist Deborah Pearson projected onto a fast-fold screen a photograph of a crowd of protesters, some of the 200,000 said to have marched during the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Pearson took up a magnifying glass – modelled on a placard held by a male protester in the picture – and held it over faces in the crowd for moments at a time.

History History History made for a good beginning to my three days at Flatpack, its critique of the organisation of history into a teleological chain of events (“this happened, and then this happened”) proving hard to cast off. Devised in partnership with comedian Daniel Kitson and live artist Tania El Khoury, History is a roving and inventive presentation of the series of quirks, the twists and turns (the sudden amputation of an actor’s career; the overthrow of an uprising) that had a hand in Pearson’s birth in Canada, and her being in Birmingham on the evening of 6 April 2017.”