Trumpington Voices
'Wow, all this going on around me, it's fantastic!'
Trumpington Voices was a public art project led by Menagerie Theatre Company, conceived and directed by Patrick Morris. The project recorded stories and experiences of *Trumpington’s diverse community during a time of radical change and re-shaping. It set out to understand how Trumpington, the place, impacts upon its residents’ lives. What emerged more strongly was the reverse: the residents’ extraordinary impact upon Trumpington.
Two distinct products came out of the project: a verbatim play performed by local residents, which drew directly from interviews with Trumpington residents; and a sound archive of the more than 50 conversations recorded by a team of interviewers, themselves Trumpington residents.
This legacy website hosts testimony from volunteers, theatre professionals and other project participants. It gives background information on the interviews, the play-making process and the people that made it all happen.
Trumpington Voices was funded by a Cambridge City Council S106 Public Art Grant.
Performances of the play took place at The Clay Farm Centre on Friday 8 and Saturday 9 June 2018. The full text of the play is freely available on request from Menagerie Theatre Company.
*The place in question is the established community of Trumpington and the new communities of Clay Farm, Trumpington Meadows and Glebe Farm, which are currently under construction. In all, 4000 new dwellings will have been built by the time construction comes to an end.
The Project
The project started in November 2017 and reached its conclusion in June 2018. Members of the Trumpington community were at the heart of the project from the beginning until the end. Residents took on roles as interviewers and interviewees, formed the acting company to perform the play, designed the set, welcomed audience members, and many became audience members! The interviewees’ stories form the fabric of the play's text and their voices make up the sound archive.
The People
The project was made possible by a team of professionals and a large number of Trumpington Residents.
Interviews
Menagerie interviewed 58 Trumpington residents, aged 12 to 86, who live in all parts of Trumpington, old and new. The interviews were carried out between November 2017 - April 2018. At the time of the interviews, some had lived in their homes for a matter of weeks, others had been there for over 70 years.
The Production
The production of Trumpington Voices is a verbatim play by local playwright, Craig Baxter, and it is based on the interviews of Trumpington residents about the place they live in.
Performances of the play were held at Clay Farm Centre on Friday 8 and Saturday 9 June 2018. Clay Farm Centre is the new shared-facility space overlooking Hobson Square, in the heart of one of the new developments in Trumpington. As well as being a thriving community centre it also hosts the new library, cafe and NHS medical practice.
'The estate feels like it's folk music, Grantchester feels like classical music and the rest of Trumpington maybe something in between'
Distilled from over 30 hours of interviews conducted with Trumpington residents, Trumpington Voices, the play, captures the essence of life here today. Using the words of Trumpington residents and performed almost entirely by residents of Trumpington, the 'voices' of those who have lived here all their lives mingle with those of the most recent arrivals. This unique play expresses the hopes and dreams, the struggles and joys of people living in Trumpington at this time of unprecedented change.
Performances took place at the Clay Farm Centre on Friday 8th June and Saturday 9th June. A copy of the script is available at the library or directly from Menagerie Theatre Company. For a selection of production photographs by Chris Cellier, please click on the Gallery section above.
Director: Patrick Morris
Assistant Director: Kanika Clayton
Performers: Anett Lazar, Axelle Ghidossi, Barbara Burgess, Cassie Woodfin, Charles Van Heyningen, Emma Spearing, Freyja Woodfin, Helen Patterson, Michelle Johnson, Olga Ver, Peter Durrant
All photographs of rehearsals, performance and the streets of Trumpington by Chris Cellier
Sound Archive
The sound archive is the enduring legacy of Trumpington Voices. The interviews carried out between November 2017 – April 2018 were the starting point of the project and show the diversity of age, experience and culture at the core of the Trumpington community.
A play, by its very nature, is temporary. It is an event and an experience for both performers and audience. The project needed something more permanent as a legacy, and what better than the voices of the interviewees themselves.
We have gathered together all of the interviews and you can choose which ones to listen to by clicking on each link. Our enduring hope is that they will be available in perpetuity and will indeed show the stories behind the concrete, cranes and construction. They are proof of how lives can be at once ordinary and extraordinary and that it is people who create a community, rather than architects, planners and policymakers.
They are listed alphabetically, with some interviewees wishing to remain anonymous. We have divided them into 2 sections. The first section contains all the conversations carried out by our team of community volunteers. The second section contains conversations between those volunteers - they interviewed each other at the beginning and at the end of the project.