A shipping container has been placed in the middle of Truro, Cornwall and named The Playing Place. It opened on 26 March and will remain in place until 25 April. Inside the container visitors are able to interact with written and spoken language, stories and theatre. Domenic Lippa was invited to design a poster for the interior of the container influenced by the words of the BBC and Channel 4 script writer, James Henry.
Inspired by one sentence in the text Domenic Lippa and his team created a red and black comma referencing the fox’s tail. Here is the complete text written by James Henry describing his memorable introduction to theatre:
‘A True Story.’
‘The first play I ever saw was at the Minack Theatre, an adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was eleven, and fell in love with the girl playing a fox. She had a wonderful bushy red tail, and had devised a way of twitching it to punctuate her lines. I couldn’t work out how.
‘During the White Witch’s most dramatic exit, her sleigh toppled over accidentally. The audience gasped, but the White Witch retrieved the situation by enthusiastically whipping the dwarf driver until he righted the vehicle and dragged it off the stage by himself. The audience murmured in approval, and I realised at that moment there was almost no hole you couldn’t dig yourself out of, as long as you were prepared to publicly and physically rebuke the nearest sufferer of achondroplasia.
‘I know now that this was wrong, but after a lifetime of monstrous dwarf abuse, combined with a series of doomed relationships with red-haired women, I fear it is too late to change, and so I write from my prison cell in order to urge all parents to consider very carefully the first theatrical entertainment to which they subject their innocent, and perhaps too-easily-influenced offspring.
‘Sometimes I think the tail was real.’
Project Team: Domenic Lippa, partner, Jeremy Kunze and Lucy Groom designers, James Henry, writer.
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