Listen to the Article
Key Highlights
I wonder if that was the future that they had hoped for when navigating urbanisation, verticality and the degrees of human agency that were shaped by a rapidly modernizing city.
The first time I ever attended a read-through was in the Corpus Playroom, an intimate theatre venue in the heart of my university town, Cambridge. Skylines was undoubtedly different to a staged play. I found myself struck by the novelty of being part of something, not quite so private, but not public either. A myriad of themes was thrown at us, the audience, in the most limbo-esque of atmospheres: inter-war London. Skylines exuded curiosity, whether it was about living life suspended in the indoor verticality of skylines or traversing the city horizontally in the multilinear tunnel that is the underground.
The play maps the central characters’ attempts, Archie and Lily’s, to come to terms with their newly vertical lives, having moved into one of the city's first 'skyscrapers'. Mr Cayder (a construction worker) and Ivy are, instead, the pivotal figures of interaction for Archie and Lily respectively.
Having crossed paths with Skylines behind the scenes, it was only natural that my tribute to it would have entailed going behind the curtain and, this time, directly to the source. This led me to interview the creative mind behind it all: Isabella Bottle, a St John’s History graduate.
Interview
Q: Archie mentions how moving to London, more specifically to the skylines, comes with a sense of powerlessness. How does that agency reflect today, when it comes to London as a destination for adulthood?
A: I definitely feel like there is that draw to the city as holding all opportunities, but at the same time, especially since the pandemic, there's this idea of being able to work remotely which complicates things. I think that's a similar discussion to the idea of the underground being able to bring people out into the countryside, away from the chaos. But when I go to London now, I see towering office blocks and they’re all empty and the cafes beneath them desolate, with no one in them. There’s a contrast between the existence of these very central areas of the city, built up to facilitate all those offices and these large corporations, with the sudden realisation that work can happen from home or online, where these strange, alien spaces are no longer useful.
Q: I found Lily’s personal approach to maps intriguing, especially as she makes them “her own”, adding “her own features”. Was this a stubborn way for Lily to maintain agency in London’s conveyor belt?
A: Well, I wouldn't say stubborn… I try to show, for all of the characters, the ways that sort of invention and imagination is really what allows them to keep making sense of things in a constantly changing world. At the time, knowing what a place meant, or what that destination consists of, was a relatively new concept, just like the Underground. Lily sees that as an opportunity to add her own details: she's not trying to reproduce an old map, but rather taking the opportunity to write on that map what matters to her and what certain locations mean to her. This is mirrored by Cayder on the construction site, where he engages with aerial photography. This idea of the ‘bird's eye view’ was becoming more popular for the first time, having been used in the First World War. It’s something we take for granted nowadays, having Google Earth at our disposal, but I thought it was interesting to touch on people’s first experiences of zooming out on their lives and mapping places in different ways.
Q: Lily mentions how the underground is “a place in itself”. Do you think the underground is a place and if so, what kind of place is it? How did the propaganda depict it at the time?
A: It was a major marketing campaign, of an unprecedented scale. It’s strange because, on the one hand, the Underground and its logo become almost London’s identity, practically synonymous with the city. On the other hand, however, those adverts were trying to advertise the underground as an alternative to the city, despite it being the heart of the city. There were posters also promoting the safety of the underground, with almost scientific diagrams that would show you how escalators worked so that you'd feel confident. Posters were the key to creating a language of comfort and safety when portraying something that could otherwise be experienced as terrifying: being under a tunnel, below the ground, without GPS or wi-fi and essentially no way of knowing where you really are. When you think about it, being down there makes us almost blank out, where we’re not asked to think about reality but rather access this limbo and block its strangeness out.
Q: You explored the concept of living life suspended in the play. What did you mean by that?
A: The idea of being suspended concerns both the underground and the high-rise living. One of my favourite quotes in the play is when Archie says “I want to move. I don't want to be moved”, which refers to the inevitability of being suspended, whether it's a lift or an underground train moving you, with no way of stopping or being able to control it. Anything could happen and there’s a degree of powerlessness in your ability to change things when suspended. People were conscious of it being a period of change, whether it was about the character of the city evolving, skyscrapers overrunning or talk of a possible war. I feel like we're kind of in that moment nowadays with AI, where change could swing either way.
Q: You often touch upon contradictions, in the play, of sharing space in an individualistic way, when travelling underground. How is that idea echoed in the skylines? Is there something about indoor verticality and access to views that makes them liberating?
A: I think that was partly where the idea of the play for the title came from: “Skylines”: the idea of travelling along a line, whether it’s in the sky or underground. There’s also a concept I came across, the idea of non-spaces, places that don't have a specific location. And it’s interesting to think of the tube’s ephemerality, where the travel isn’t about interaction, but rather going from point A to point B. And the same can be said for living in high-rise buildings. Whether it’s about efficiency or amazing views, both are isolating spaces, where you don’t quite know what, or who surrounds you. I think that's one of the sorts of ironies I've written about a lot here. The idea is that modernization has this promise, where new things are always better. There is a comment from Frank Pick that stands out, where he said that they'd put their offices on the top floor of a high-rise building, hoping the air would be cleaner. However, being at the same level as the chimney, the air was dirtier and thicker. The idea that situations would improve but the result not being quite what you're promised.
Q: Why did you pick specific jobs for certain characters?
A: I wanted Lily to be the main voice of these ideas. I didn’t want Archie to be the one going out into the world, having these ideas and then coming back to tell his partner about them. I was inspired by women being in charge of designing posters, at the time, for the Underground. That's where I got the idea for Lily’s job. As for Archie, the journalist, he’s interviewing the construction workers, who I wanted to be on that same intellectual level. Their experiences of the skyscraper process are impossible to know for sure unless one is looking at historical archives of the time. The danger described in the play is just a way of trying to understand what that might have felt like and putting that into words.
Q: You talk about the danger of living in the skylines, where “The photos speak for themselves […] nothing is holding us up.” What made it so dangerous?
A: So, there's a few facets to the dangerous aspect, in the context of construction and aerial photography. People working on the steel frames of these buildings, with no harnesses, which meant that if they fell, there was nothing to stop them from falling down. Some of the photos, on the other hand, look quite romantic: workers sitting up there, their legs over the edge, eating a sandwich or something. But there were accidents, written about in the newspapers, about people that had fallen fatally, at least in America. Similarly, danger was echoed in the digging of the underground, especially under the Thames. And so, people were suddenly thinking this could be a serious issue. A strange but interesting example is how, in 1950s London, there was a shift away from high-rise living and a focus on offices instead. The idea was that you could work in a dangerous building but not live in one, even though you’d spend 8 hours a day there. People had to put a lot of trust in those high-rise buildings, with the promise that they'd have better standards of living.
I wonder if that was the future that they had hoped for when navigating urbanisation, verticality and the degrees of human agency that were shaped by a rapidly modernizing city. The playwright deftly uses these themes to comment on modern-day challenges, such as the shift to remote work, the impact of skyscrapers, and the loss of personal connection in shared, yet isolating spaces. By blending history with contemporary relevance, Skylines invites reflection on the paradoxes of progress and modernisation, ultimately highlighting the resilience of individuals who navigate these contradictions.
***
Quotations occasionally underwent minor adjustments to facilitate the transition from spoken to written form,
while maintaining the integrity and authenticity of the interview that took place.
***
Image credits:
Tungsten Tang (black and white images, top and bottom left, via @skylines_corpusplayroom); Paul Ashley (colour image, bottom right; rehearsals)