It’s 1961 and the concrete’s just been poured for a brand new housing estate. It’s beautiful, not because of the clean lines, indoor toilets and wide windows, but because the idea behind it is beautiful. This is the future, and it’s for everyone.
It’s 2018 and the last tower of the estate is about to come down. The dream that saw it built has long since died and now the estate has to follow suit to make way for new buildings, based on new ideas. This is the future, whether you like it or not.
Kandinsky brings the company’s trademark theatrical inventiveness to city life, exploring a community trying to find its way in a landscape shaped by power. Trap Street charts 50 years of changing attitudes to ownership and space in London, to ask what home means in 2018.
★★★★ ‘Trap Street is an 80-minute show that melds an astonishing complexity of themes, a mastery of form and a deep, deep humanity … another triumph for Kandinsky’ Time Out
‘not only the highlight of the festival but one of the most ingenious pieces of new theater I have seen recently… The three-person cast deftly shifts between time periods in a mesmerizing single act that combines minimal stagecraft, improvised music and finely chiseled performances to create an anguished cry of moral outrage about neoliberal economic policies, gentrification and the erosion of the social security system.’ New York Times
★★★★ ‘Timely critique about the housing crisis is both angry and humane.’ Evening Standard
★★★★ ‘Compelling and intelligent’ The Stage
‘ferociously intelligent, poignant … Trap Street effectively maps the process of British dreaming, and how that process is permanently written into the landscape itself.’ Exeunt
Cast: Amelda Brown, Danusia Samal, Hamish MacDougall
Amalia Vitale played Young Andrea in the Berlin run.
Music composed and performed by Zac Gvirtzman
Director: James Yeatman
Producer: Lauren Mooney
Co-designers: Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen
SM: Eleanor Dear
Devised by the company, based on original material by James Yeatman and Lauren Mooney
Photographs by Gianmarco Bresadola
Trap Street premiered at the New Diorama in March 2018. In 2019 it played at the Festival of International New Drama (FIND) at the Schaubühne in Berlin.
This production was developed and staged with support from Complicite, Unity Theatre Trust, the Foyle Foundation, the New Diorama Emerging Companies Fund and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
We remain indebted to our crowdfunding supporters: Alice Marples, Anonymous, Becky-Dee Trevenen, Billy Barrett, Boadicea Baker, Brydie Lee-Kennedy, Camilla Valerie Whitehill, David Byrne, Ellice Stevens, Erin Hopkins, Eve Leigh, Gill Bannister, Heather Doole, John O’Donovan, Julie Baker, Kate Whaite, Kati Donlon, Mark Rawle, Maureen Lennon, Patience Harding, Sally Muckley, Stewart Pringle, Tom Ferguson, Tom Richards, Will Young.
