Foreword to How (not) to Live in Suburbia

In summer 2014, I became dangerously lonely. It was not only humiliating but surprising for me. I’m gregarious. I have good social skills. I love hard and well. So I swallowed my pride and tried to talk about my loneliness to my friends.

It was clear from my unofficial study that talking about loneliness felt treacherous. There was a received understanding at the time that old people were lonely. The elderly are, of course, disproportionately lonely. I’m not in any sense knocking elder loneliness. But it felt that our acceptance of and compassion for elder loneliness was a way of distancing ourselves from our own.

It seemed important that if I was going to make a show about loneliness, that it should be honest and autobiographical and also funny – that because the stigma attached to being lonely was so great I needed to exorcise it by being really frank about my own downward spiral. I’d never done an autobiographical show before, but the content demanded it.

My own loneliness, I knew, stemmed in part from being exiled in a life that didn’t feel like my own – the suburbia I’m talking about is a metaphorical space but is also a geographical reality – and so the show is in part a love letter to my much maligned and much adored city. Writing this foreword today after the recent terror attacks and the atrocity of the Grenfell Tower Fire, that heterogeneity and tolerance that, to me, is the spirit of London, is being shaken to its very foundations by other, egregious agendas – for instance of social cleansing, of fear of other, of contempt for the poor. But Londoners are tough, resilient, angry, and love their city, and they will not stop fighting to ensure London keeps her integrity.

When I was in Edinburgh 2014 doing my previous show, Raymondo, I had met Richard DeDomenici, whose neeky psychogeographical love and knowledge of cities, playfulness, satirical bent, keen eye, and filmic prowess, meant he became the obvious person for me to collaborate with on this show. Richard directed all the films that are in this show, and because video is such an important part of it we’ve put some stills in to give you a flavour.

Since we first made the show, in the way of things, the conversation about loneliness in the media has broadened. It’s now known, for instance, that chronic loneliness has serious physical as well as mental health implications – that many different demographics are susceptible to it – that it can be self perpetuating – that it can be life threatening – cf the much quoted “15 cigarettes” soundbite – that it often has no relationship to existing social skills. There have been some brilliant books written about it: here I’d like to shout out two: John Cacioppo, the Chicago based neuroscientist, writes limpidly about loneliness as a biosociological phenomenon. I read his book – aptly titled Loneliness – late into making the show and was surprised and oddly relieved at how he seemed to be describing me.

The second is Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City which is a much more subjective, poetic take on the author’s own loneliness and contains some absolutely perfect sentences: “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective: it is a city…. What matters is kindness…what matters is solidarity.”

All theatre is collaborative, but making this show, in which I air my most befouled laundry and try and make good, accessible art from it, has been more collaborative than most. I’d like to thank everyone who supported the show from its inception to its full realisation – Brian and the Camden People’s Theatre Family, Emma and the Ferment Family, Pulse Festival, China Plate, Latitude Festival, Ruby, Sarah and everyone at Derby Theatre, Arts Council England, New Wolsey Theatre, Peggy Ramsay Foundation, Colchester Arts Centre, Summerhall, Krissi Musiol, Pamela Qualter, Soho Theatre. And individually I’d like to thank the excellent human beings who work with me and who helped me shape this show and also helped me survive the making of it. These are – Richard DeDomenici, Anthony Roberts, Adam Robertson,Andy Purves, my producer Jen Smethurst, Justin Audibert my regular director, and most of all Nicki Hobday, who joined us to play “all other women” in the videos and ended up co-directing the show, playing me in the stage version of the show, overseeing our marketing campaign, and becoming my sometime nanny, housemate, and Walrus dispeller. I’d like to dedicate this book to the lonely and those who help them, particularly all Samaritans, particularly the Samaritans of Kingston branch.

– Annie Siddons, June 2016