Foreword to Dennis of Penge 

In early 2016 I got sober, and in order to help my sobriety, started writing articles for a sobriety website. I noticed that all the other articles seemed to paint an entirely positive picture of sobriety. (My skin is so glowing! I have so much energy! I look so young! I’ve lost so much weight!) There are obvious, benevolent reasons for that – encouragement, for instance – but it seemed like a half-truth and it felt really important to share the difficulties as well as the positives with other early sober people. For me, one of the hardest things about early sobriety was the debilitating and medievally demonic depression that overtook me for the first six months, which everyone in the literature seemed to be keeping a secret.

Later this was replaced by the strain of not feeling the release and disinhibition of substances – of never being OUT OF MY HEAD – and having to retrain myself to feel those things without them. It seemed like such hard, tedious work. It seemed that in the sobriety literature, no one was talking about this either. So I started writing about looking for Dionysus – the god of transcendence and ecstasy – who I anglicised as Dennis– in various experiences I made myself undertake. At the same time I read Johann Hari’s book on addiction, Chasing the Scream, which controversially and convincingly posits that addiction is not in fact a progressive disease but a symptom of a lack of connection. I’d also been obsessed by Target Culture and its nefarious influence on our whole social structure and sense of ourselves since watching Adam Curtis’s The Trap, and seeing and experiencing its inhumane results in the mental health and benefits system at first hand; I wanted to ask what happens to people in the system when they are deemed well enough to leave it – but without a structure or community to support them. An unrepentant Londoner by birth and choice, I wrote an ode to London in my last show, How (Not) to Live in Suburbia, and in this show I focus in on my childhood ends of Penge, one of the last ungentrified places in London, but rapidly changing.

My last show was unabashedly autobiographical, and this time I wanted to create an epic, mythical, heroic tale without me in it. Wendy and Hortense are real people from my childhood and Dennis is also based on a composite of childhood friends, so there is a lot of me in this show, but it’s not about me.

I’ve always been obsessed by the Bacchae, how economically and devastatingly it tells the truth, and right now it feels like we need this tale of opposing societal/psychic forces more than ever. So I’ve borrowed heavily and unapologetically from Euripides in the structure and form of Dennis.

The making of this show has been an interesting one (and not without complexities). I’d like to shout out to my oaken hearted producers, Jen and Emma, for being absolute legends. I’d like to raise a glass of zero per cent beer to Alex Rogerson, our Arts Council relationship manager. I’d like to ululate to the whole team, who are solid gold mensches, and to everyone at the venues who has supported this project on its sometimes bumpy road from its inception through to now. You are noticed. We massively appreciate you.

I’ve made this show with a brilliant composer, Asaf Zohar. It’s our first collaboration and his first theatre piece and I’m extremely excited about it. Hope you enjoy.

– Annie Siddons, August 2018.