‘There’s somethin’ about this house. Somethin’ here. Somethin’ in the walls. Its bones. Like DNA.’
A family packs into a small house with a tangled history. Matt is here, yearning to reach someone he’s lost. His cousin Jess is here, too; she just wants to feel something. Anything. And Aunt Monica and Jeff are still here, just about. Together, ferocious and funny, they laugh, they scrap, they remember.
Tonight these four people, inextricably bound yet so far apart, will finally confront the old decisions that haunt them. How does a family make a future, when everything that holds it together lies in the past?
Clive Judd’s play Here is a tender, funny and utterly truthful story about family and feeling. It was premiered by Papatango at Southwark Playhouse, London, in November 2022 after winning the Papatango New Writing Prize, whose previous discoveries have gone on to win Olivier, Critics’ Circle and OffWestEnd Awards and be performed worldwide.
‘Creepy and captivating… there is something utterly invigorating about Judd’s writing: it is funny, delicate, assured, pleasurably circuitous… a truly exciting discovery with what feels like a quietly radical new form of genre-defying theatre’
— Guardian
‘Engaging, empathetic and spooky, with a beautiful pattern of slow revelation… Papatango has once again identified a talent worth watching’
— Evening Standard
‘A hauntingly beautiful drama of family secrets… has a strange, captivating power… lyrical and elegiac… Judd deftly uses the uncanny to tell a very human, very flesh-and-blood story… unsettling and rather beautiful’
— The Stage
‘Full of humour and heart … [Judd has] a great deal of writing talent’
— Reviews Hub
‘Excellent… an absorbing and moving play that deals intelligently with ideas of memory, seen and unseen connections, and the difficulties of articulating feelings… highly recommended’
— Everything Theatre
Papatango New Writing Prize
