DEBORAH WARNER

Performances: 18-24 June 1995

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Creative Team

Director - Deborah Warner

Designer - Hildegard Bechtler

Producer - Clare Fox

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Deborah Warner, takes you on a fantastical walk through this magnificent Victorian gothic building. Once a bustling hotel, the now empty building has as powerful a presence as the noise and commotion must have had in its heyday. Encounters and sightings await you in the deserted servants' quarters, the pannelled coffee room, the smoking room and the famous majestic iron staircase. Following a marked path, you will make the journey alone taking a central role in discovering and even creating the experience that waits for you.

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“I’ve hardly stopped talking about and even dreamt of The St Pancras Project, Deborah Warner’s contribution to the London International Festival of Theatre, but would not betray even one of its secrets were it not that the doors of the hotel - alas - will not reopen until it is another place entirely, restored to clean, modern oblivion ... from the beginning it was extraordinary”. - Kate Kellaway, The Observer 

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“One of the strangest and most memorable successes of last year’s LIFT festival ... was Warner’s ST PANCRAS PROJECT, which treated the grand, wrecked, abandoned interior of Gilbert Scott’s Victorian Gothic station hotel as a sort of “found poem” on the theme of suspension between two lives. Audience members, if so they could still be called, were sent individually through it on a mapped-out “fantastical walk”. Inverting normal theatrical convention, where the building houses a communally shared experience, the building in this case constituted the experience, as vestigial ghosts of its former existence stirred, flitted, and half-materialised at the corner of your eye, making you feel like Alice alone in a serially haunting dream.”  Paul Taylor - The Independent