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It’s been described as “funny, frank and compassionate” (The Stage) and a “heartbreakingly autobiographical performance” (Festmag). Last week saw the Bristol premiere of How (Not) To Live in Suburbia – and Marmalade Trust was delighted to be invited along.
Playwright Annie Siddons’ show about loneliness played out to a packed crowd at Bristol’s Mayfest festival. The one-hour performance based on Annie’s own life is about a single mum, artist and proud Londoner finding herself accidentally living in suburbia, AKA ‘Twickenham: Home of Rugby’. The audience were hooked in from the start by a fast-moving mix of live performance, video, voiceover and surrealism, all underpinned by a savagely sharp humour that documents Annie’s spiral down into extreme loneliness.
Annie felt inspired to do the show after becoming “dangerously lonely” in the summer of 2014. “I’d never done an autobiographical show before,” she says. “It was important that if I did a show about loneliness that it should be honest but also funny, because the stigma attached to being lonely was so great that I needed to exorcise it by being really frank about my own downward spiral.”
She certainly did that. How (Not) To Live In Suburbia was a thought-provoking, shocking, laugh-out-loud visual feast from Annie and co performer Sarah Moore. Afterwards there was a Q&A hosted by Marmalade Trust, in which Annie talked further about the show and loneliness. All of us who attended were left changed and inspired by one woman’s insistent and compelling take on an issue that affects all of us.
To find out more about Annie visit:
Twitter: @LaSiddons
Facebook: @AnnieSiddonsTheatre