‘What use is paper? To speak, to imagine, to remember .. we write our dreams on it. We tell our secrets to it. We express our deepest selves’.
This is the story of boy meets girl, a chance encounter of next door neighbours after she (flat 6), sends flat 4 a postcard: ‘Please could you shut the fxxx up, your music is doing my bloody head in!’ He (flat 4) replies with an apology, written in the shape of an origami paper rose. It is the daily use of paper which is the start of their enchanting love affair, so youthful, carefree, sharing a passion for arts and literature. She is a travel writer, he is a budding novelist.
With the wide eyed innocence of young love, Emma Mullen and Christopher Jordan-Marshall portray the perfectly matched couple, performed through poetic songs and the melody of their journey together captured on scraps of paper.
A banknote and a book are at the romantic heart of the 2001 movie, Serendipity. Sara literally bumps into Jonathan in Bloomingdales as they both grab the last pair of black cashmere gloves. He writes his telephone number on a $1 bill while she scribbles her contact details in the fly leaf of a second hand copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’. It will be the serendipitous signals of pure fate – and paper - which may or may not reconnect them.
It’s illuminating to appreciate how paper unwittingly follows us through life, bookended with official certificates from our birth to death; ‘there’s letters, shopping lists, train tickets, passports, postcards, love letters, newspapers, bills, last wills and testaments, posters, Post it notes to remind you not to forget the thing that you always forget’.
The creation of this rom com musical is part of a real life drama in itself. In 2016, the songwriter and composer Gareth Williams contacted the playwright Oliver Emanuel to suggest that his BBC radio play would make a ‘good musical’. Tragically, Emanuel passed away from brain cancer aged just 43, in December 2023, which adds to the poignancy of this hauntingly truthful love story.
The importance of memories, photographs and letters to preserve a fragment of precious times past, flutter through the play, shifting from light-hearted joy to heartbreaking sadness.
This is not just a ‘good musical’ but an exquisite modern opera relating the timelessness of love through words, music and song.
Showtimes:
Thu 1 – Sun 25 August, 2024 (Times vary daily)
Ticket prices: £22.75 (£17.75, £15,75, £5)
Age guidance: 12+
https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/a-history-of-paper-festival-24