Things On Fire H.Q

For the first time Things On Fire have a base for rehearsal, storage, and possibly performance. Situated above a church in Clapham Junction the H.Q has everything an aspiring theatre company may need: kitchen, storage/workshop room, and a good sized rehearsal space. The plan over the coming months is to adapt the space to make it more performance friendly, which will include: blackout curtains, basic lighting, seating, flats, and various ’things’ which the company like to use in the devising process. From the H.Q Things On Fire can start to spread the word of cheap art for all. The company plan to mark the occasion this Sunday with the continuing rehearsal of Love is a Dog from Hell and a celebratory roast.


The company will also continue to progress with the redevelopment of the website and a company blog to mark progress. I will post this information here as and when it comes.

In honour of our new home I have pasted the company manifesto below:

Things On Fire: 1st Manifesto

There is an overwhelming problem facing the world, the problem of things on fire. For years we have produced, horded and consumed a startling amount of things, things that have finally had enough. The time has come when they shall have their revenge - AH!

On returning from work one evening you will find your table has spontaneously combusted and your suit is smouldering in the wardrobe… Pots and pans spark in the cupboards and the glowing ashes of a doormat crackle in the wind outside… When out walking you see a pair of shoes burning in a shop window… A road sweeper's broom smokes on the street as it pushes piles of flaming cans into a melting bin.

And yet the fire will not stop there. It will spread and catch rooftops, houses and trees, roads and streetlights.

Can we possibly justify making any more? When many have little enough to sustain themselves, we just stand by and let things burn. And yet they have been burning for a long time, so long in fact that we hardly notice anymore…

We have been abruptly awakened by the accidental meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table; teaspoons, light-bulbs, nudes and table legs; axels, eyelids, top hats and mandolins. The immediate absurdity of the object out of its place, scurrying along the tabletop, swinging from the periphery; the object rising from its ashes and diagnosing its sickness. The poor, inconsiderable, low, inanimate object, salvaged from the scrapheap, found on a side-street, washed up in a drainpipe…the object stamped with the sign of death, the object that has had a life already… Things on Fire make these objects perform, fusing them with the poorest objects of their kind, giving them a new form, a new significance, a new life - a bike, a hat, a bed, a mannequin.

Our aesthetic is born out of a passion for the surreal and the cinematic, the photographic and the atmospheric, the dark and the beautiful moving image. Through puppetry and performing objects the company have developed a theatrical language with which to paint pictures and set scenes, a stage upon which actors are shaped within their surroundings and framed in a space as if seen through a camera's lens.