Them Next Door

Them Next Door, based on a new play by Chris Cooper, is a project committed to bringing people together. A two-hour interactive experience will be part performance and part participation facilitated by Blindspot members with the audience, for teenagers and adults, exploring alienation, identity, isolation and the need to talk and listen.

A block of flats in a city. Today. Two neighbours cross in silence in the stairwell.

They both know who the other is, but they do not know who they are:  the boy finds it hard to feel at home; the man doesn’t recognise where he grew up anymore. It's cold.
Inside his flat, the man knows the boy should be in school. Outside in the corridor, the boy sits slumped on the floor, locked out.

The clock on the wall ticks. Time passes. The man gets up from his chair and opens his door...

The atomisation of human relationships is familiar to all of us in communities everywhere. Increasingly we are separated by our difference, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age etc., rather than brought together by our similarities. Its disorientating.

This makes us increasingly susceptible to divisive narratives and discourse - anger, resentment and distrust, often underpins the excessive chatter or profound silence that accompanies it.