Journal

30th January 2024

Story of Uninvited Guests by Maddy Costa

At a recent board meeting we asked Maddy Costa to write some thoughts on the story of Uninvited Guests. This is what she wrote:

"When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about a couple standing up on the other side of a long table, holding hands while we listen to a song that speaks to their love for each other.

I think about gazing into the eyes of a stranger and feeling the room around us dissolve.

I think about parading through Battersea to the sound of a trumpet, and the people who campaigned to improve the quality of life there.

When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about slips of tissue paper burning away the ills of the world, and a crowd of people chanting together: make better please.

I think about standing in the dark in Soho, part of a group redesigning the architecture, seeing our madcap ideas merge before our eyes.

And a quiet night in Malvern, watching rocks and trees shatter and reform, my heart expanding with every movement.

When I think about Uninvited Guests, I think about what the future might look like, with the playfulness I struggle for elsewhere, and I think about the past that brought me here, and feel glad that it brought me here.

I think about how all of these works I’ve seen – Love Letters, The Good Neighbour, Make Better Please, Give Me Back My Broken Night, This Last Tempest, To Those Born Later – were made in the years when Jess and Richard were raising families, when Paul and Jesse were in Bristol while Richard was in London, when Paul was navigating the corporatisation of universities, and Tory attacks on arts education, when all of them were struggling with cuts to arts funding, and I think about the tenacity it takes to keep going in such an environment. The dedication.

So when I think about Uninvited Guests, a lot of what I’m thinking about is social change, and how rare it is for Uninvited Guests to address the idea of social change without an invitation to audiences to listen to each other’s voices and ideas, to think and feel together. With the result that, when I think about Uninvited Guests, I also think about and remember their audiences with an unusual clarity. If I believe in Uninvited Guests more than I do in many other theatre companies, this might be why: that sense of participating with, not being performed at.

Inevitably, then, when I think about Uninvited Guests, I’m also thinking a little about myself: who I am in the world, what I bring to a community, what my role might be in the slow movement toward social change. I recognise a connection in being roughly the same age as the company, and that this might have a little something to do with why their work resonates with me so: how often I felt them articulate a thought I didn’t know I had, or sharpen a thought I did.

I also think about myself as a board member for the company, in particular a conversation we had together – some time in 2017 perhaps – in which we wondered about the dramaturgy of the company, what connects the seemingly disparate kinds of work they make, so different from each other in form: performance on stage, walking shows involving audio, participatory work, some reliant on advanced technologies. The through line we reached (and I still have the notes we took, the diagrams illustrating this, I found the conversation so inspiring) was that Uninvited Guests examine the past to better dream the future, project the future to better understand the present. And in a decade when it’s been harder and harder to be hopeful, when I think about Uninvited Guests, hopeful is how I feel." 

Posted by Anonymous: 30th January 2024