NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR

““Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind ”

- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

There is a certain quality to the conversations we have when we are young that resist capture- call it summer, call it spring, call it the vague blue of midnight as bare feet clamber rooftops. They are conversations scored by stars, borrowed whisky, and a certain invulnerable imagination They are poetry

If youth is the season of poetry and possibility, then it is also the season of permanence- at no other age are we so apt to believe that our sensitivities, ideas, partings, heartbreak, and resolves are the last of their kind. Every crisis and every tenderness seems final, simply because it is new. There is magic in this because- as poetry does- it invokes a reverence for living. I have not come across a text that captures this sense of poetry quite like Climbers, stakes a claim on its importance, and insists that a magical life is a human right.

We begin this show in a world where that magical landscape of Art and Language has been stifled by existing power structures It is a world where only old men with holes in their sleeves teach the books that only young, wealthy, protected men write. And yet, when the house lights come up, we leave this world having witnessed a young woman pocket the magic and bravely begin to contribute her first verse.

When I think about the theatre I want to make, I imagine the theatre I would like my younger sister to see. What I hope is that Climbers extends a radical hospitality to women like her, alongside an assurance that life is magical, and an insistence that when we raise our voices, it is our right to this magic that we are fighting for.

Few would say that the value of Art inheres in making something happen in the world. But a poem is written for two audiences: the one it may create, whose conversation it invites; and the one that has created it, whose conversation it invokes

This is why it is worth scaling rooftops for When marginalised voices co-opt the rooftops that have only belonged to the elite, they insist not only on their right to a voice, but on their right to create magic; a life worthy of reverence They insist upon magic being universal

This is what I would like young women to know.

This astonishingly ambitious show would not have been made possible without the uncompromising devotion of this band of poets Thank you for bringing your souls to the room each day – for you I am so grateful Thank you especially to Elly D’Arcy; for your courage to put this story into language, and for the unwavering support you have given myself and this extraordinary team throughout this process

Finally: I must thank the voices that haunt this show who spoke when they were silenced: bless those shameless women Bless their shameless bodies and their shameless, shameless tongues To them we owe the poetry we have, and the voices with which we write our own.