Playwright and actor Polly Wiseman in collaboration with sculptor Josie Spencer first created this immersive sculpture exhibition for The Playground theatre 2018. It was there I first saw it and to get to the venue meant walking past the Grenfell tower ruin. It’s hard to describe how raw the experience of this text coupled with these sculptures was then, placed so close in time and location to Grenfell. In true Wiseman genius, Polly rubs then and now together and it is impossibles for it not to bring to stark clarity parallels in peoples’ experiences through time. Her work in this show explores with such humanity the courage and resilience of humans caught up in disaster. The timeline you follow begins with the Great Plague of 1665-6,travels through riots, fires, wars, more fires and more plague. When I immersed myself in this reworked and updated version for the Riverside Studios, I was pulled in, moved, devastated and uplifted.

It’s Polly’s dexterity with text placed exactly where it is necessary that made her the perfect fit for collaboration on Hawk, our piece devised in 2018-19. She excavates what is essential in the language so as to enrich the medium in which her words are placed. Polly’s craft fits beautifully with ours and in Hawk, her text is woven through it and ignites the imagination.

https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/damage-control-7227/