The Paper Man
An irreverent show about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them.
Co-commissioned by Norfolk & Norwich Festival, La Strada Graz and Soho Theatre. Co-produced with Norwich & Norfolk Festival. Supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and the London Community Foundation.
In 1938, Matthias Sindelar captains the Austrian football team to victory over East Germany, in stark defiance of a Nazi order that the game should be drawn. A few months later, Sindelar and his girlfriend are found dead in their apartment.
In 2018, middle aged, white British, football addict-in-recovery Lee Simpson wants answers. He decides to make a show. A show about football, about rebellion, about standing up to fascism. And at its heart, the myth of the man who ridiculed the Third Reich.
Yet when Lee hires four women to make the show with him, they decide they don’t want to perform (yet) another play about a “heroic”, dead, white man. So what stories do we tell? And who gets to tell them? Is Sindelar an inspirational little guy or yet another man and his ego?
In a paper world of light and shadow, violence and dance, five performers work together on what sets them apart…
The Paper Man premiered at the Norwich Puppet Theatre as part of Norfolk & Norwich Festival, and at La Strada Festival in Graz, Austria in 2018. The show was then presented at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol (Jan 2019) and at the Soho Theatre, London (Feb - Mar 2019).
Show created and performed by Vera Chok, Jess Mabel Jones, Keziah Joseph, Lee Simpson, Adrienne Quartly, and Anna-Maria Nabirye (in the original production)
Directed by Tanuja Amarasuriya
Set design by Sophia Clist
Lighting design by Colin Grenfell
Sound design by Adrienne Quartly
Shadow direction by Jess Mabel Jones
Movement direction by Grace Willis
Photography by Camilla Greenwell
Original Associate Director: Stephen Harper
Original Shadow Director: Steve Tiplady
“It felt special to watch a show that felt so completely apart from the trad hierarchies of producer-director-actor, so completely of the current cultural moment of openness and interrogation.”
Exeunt Magazine (Read the full review here)
“Some might say it was chaos, and maybe it was; but it’s the kind of evocative chaos you could watch over and over again.”
★★★★ Everything Theatre
