New Theatre: Lightbulbs

Coming this Sunday, a brand new show from queer London-based theatre makers Woodhouse&Roderick, Lightbulbs.

Picture: a warm, bright, delicate cage. Inside, a tangle of electricity, sparks between two young bodies. In our most intimate spaces, who do we trust to keep the darkness at bay? And how do we navigate the hard wires of another being? Eventually, the moth must realise his return to the flame is no longer romantic perseverance, but delusion. The bulb flickers. Giving up is an option.

We caught up with Lightbulbs Director T J Roderick to find out more…

“Lightbulbs is extremely personal to us and we really hope the audience feel that intimacy while watching. There is verbatim text in there which we’ve both agreed we could never quite come up with! People really say things you just couldn’t make up. We have always loved experimental movement stuff too, and there’s a lot of that in there. There’s also music that we love, memes that we love, irrational thought patterns that we love a little less but are very familiar with.

For us, writing together has always come naturally. The process is complimented by our friendship – a shared vocabulary we have developed since attending university together. For the first show we put on together we painted ourselves entirely in pink and orange. It was great, and we quickly realised we shared a passion for the freedom of the absurd and a deep interrogation of human connection, queerness and neurodivergence.

In Lightbulbs, want to encapsulate the experience of queer young adults dating using tinder etc, how the current social climate has shaped this. We want young queer individuals to see themselves reflected on stage, to have characters navigating the same problems they do. We want people to watch and feel understood, or that it’s okay to not always be understood – the boys in the show think differently, no matter how hard they scrabble to stay on the same page. It’s like a weird, gay, Sally Rooney for stage. Equally, we want to give audiences who don’t directly relate a window of understanding, a potential to discover universal experiences a story perhaps ostensibly different from their own.

We hope to take our little love story for a trip around the country this summer. We want to show that every queer love story, every chapter of our young romances, has weight we can’t always see at the time. The characters are in their own little lightbulb; a moment, a mindset. Tangled together like wires, sparking with the intensity of their self-growth.”

Catch Lightbulbs here on Sunday 26 January at 7.30pm | Pay What Can Afford from £4.50-£12.50