THE HighTide Festival returns to Halesworth next Friday and will include the world and UK premiers of three plays.Following on from 2009's highly successful London transfer of the critically acclaimed play Stovepipe, the festival will be staging the brand new plays Ditch, Lidless, and Moscow Live.

THE HighTide Festival returns to Halesworth next Friday and will include the world and UK premiers of three plays.

Following on from 2009's highly successful London transfer of the critically acclaimed play Stovepipe, the festival will be staging the brand new plays Ditch, Lidless, and Moscow Live.

Ditch, by Beth Steel, is set in Britain in the near future when much of the country is underwater and the government has been reduced to a group of fascist strongmen.

The men patrol the moors for “illegals” in a rural outpost of the state, and as their numbers dwindle they struggle to retain a semblance of civilisation in the face of the inevitable onset of global war.

The play is a clear-eyed look at how we might behave when the conveniences of our civilisation are taken away.

Richard Twyman directs, following his triumphant Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry IV Part II as part of the RSC Histories Season.

Lidless, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, is set 15 years ago and tells the tale of Alice, an interrogator in Guantanamo Bay who can't remember what she did there because of the pills she took at the time. However Bashir, who was a prisoner there, can't forget what she did.

The play won the Yale Drama Series Award for Playwriting in 2009.

Moscow Live, by Serge Cartwright, is about Englishman Richard Hunt's first day as acting producer on a state-run English-language television station in Moscow.

It is a fast, funny, but deadly serious look at how truth and news are rarely the same thing. It is directed by National Theatre staff director Jonathan Humphreys, who makes his HighTide directing d�but.

The festival runs from Friday, April 30 to Monday, May 3 at The Cut and The Scout Hut in Chediston Street.

Each play will be accompanied by a platform with guests interviewed by HighTide's artistic director Sam Hodges, as well as the opportunity to see a classic film on the big screen.

This year's festival also features two brand new plays by HighTide alumni Jesse Weaver and Adam Brace, which will be performed once only and in top secret locations.

For more information on HighTide visit www.hightide.org.uk.