A Public Address, award-winning Manchester theatre collective Quarantine’s takeover of BAC until 14 March 2026. Supported by Wandsworth Council as part of Wandsworth’s year as The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture, Quarantine will collaborate with a huge range of people across Lavender Hill and the wider borough, and offer audiences a rare insight into people’s lives and how they see the world.
Taking place around, throughout and from the balcony of BAC, A Public Address draws on Quarantine’s 27-year history of dismantling conventions and collaborating with all kinds of people. Quarantine will create the work with a huge range of people across Lavender Hill and the wider borough, and offer audiences a rare insight into people’s lives and how they see the world, dancing around the edges of theatre and civic art.
The takeover will include a World Premiere of a new two part work created especially for BAC, Why I am and why I am not. In the first part, entitled The Balcony, 12 people will make a speech to the public from the outside of BAC’s building – tackling subjects from the personal to the universal, the seemingly flippant to certainly urgent. Speakers will include a child; someone who makes speeches for a living; a new arrival to the city – a diverse set of individual voices and personalities, each beginning their address with ‘Why I am….’ or ‘Why I am not….’
The next day, the same people will be in conversation inside BAC in an installation of people entitled The Rooms, responding to the opposite starting point to whatever they chose to make their speech about. Why I am and why I am not in its entirety is a portrait of people and place that will examine the relationship between our public and private selves, who we are and who we proclaim to be.
Tarek Iskander, Artistic Director and CEO of Battersea Arts Centre, said: “It feels incredibly special to be co-producing A Public Address with Quarantine as part of Wandsworth’s London Borough of Culture year. Our home on Lavender Hill began life as Battersea Town Hall — a place for public debate, protest and civic imagination, with a radical, rebellious streak that’s never really left the building. “
“Quarantine’s work with us taps straight into that spirit, shining a light on the voices and experiences that make up Wandsworth today and inviting us to consider what a Town Hall means now. At its heart, the project is about what connects us, and the power of shared experiences and collective action. We can’t wait to welcome people and see how it unfolds.”
Richard Gregory, Co-Artistic Director, Quarantine said: “When Quarantine were invited to make a ‘takeover’ of BAC during Wandsworth’s year as London Borough of Culture, the starting point for us was to think about the building itself – its past as a former Town Hall, the history of its very public address, and the role it might play in the life of the area. We wanted to make a space there for people to assemble and to be seen and heard.
Built out of 3 existing pieces of Quarantine’s work, re-made locally, and 1 brand new one (the two-part Why I am and why I am not), the takeover unfolds both in and outside the building. A Public Address is a geographical and human ‘zooming in’, shifting between the public and the private, the epic and the intimate. We hope that we might stake a claim for people to have their say in a space that they can make their own.”
For nearly three decades Quarantine has been making theatre that centres on conversations between ordinary people, creating circumstances for encounters between strangers. Each production is totally unique, made without actors – a form of mass portraiture, building fragmented pictures of people and the places they happen or choose to share.
Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, SW11 5TN
Box office: 020 7223 2223
Booking link: bac.org.uk/whats-on-highlights
