Annie Siddons’ How not to Live in Suburbia returns to the Soho Theatre by popular demand after a sell-out transfer from the Edinburgh Fringe, in March 2017. This comes as part of a UK tour visiting Norwich, Harlow, Lincoln, Leeds and Brighton throughout November.
Annie Siddons takes a look at the time in her life when she found herself – performance maker, part Greek, part Egyptian, full Londoner – as a single mum living in the nuclear family haven of curtain-twitching Twickenham, the most married place in London. Annie returns to Soho Theatre following a sellout in March 2017, and will tour the show through Autumn and Spring 2018. Through performance and surreal film, she recalls her gauche attempts to fit in with the yummy mummies who run triathlons and the families that row and cycle at weekends. With an eclectic soundtrack that swings from Bowie to Bieber, from Stormzy to Sinatra, Annie conjures the vibes of the city she loves and the loneliness of the suburbia she doesn’t fit in to.
Part love letter to London, part satire of suburban culture, part text book case of a woman reacting to chronic loneliness, Annie takes a poignant and humorous look at what it is to live in a community you don’t fit in, the compromises we make for the sake of our children, how chronic loneliness manifests itself and her own personal quest to cure it.
Annie has been a volunteer for the Samaritans since 2016, and is touring How not to Live in Suburbia with their support.
Annie Siddons said, “I’m an inherently gregarious person. I’m not the person that you would think would be lonely. But I became pathologically lonely, and it affected me really deeply, changed my personality and my outlook. It became impossible for me not to talk about it. It became very dangerous for me. There’s a brilliant quote in Julius Caesar: “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure” and that’s what it was like for me, I was dwelling in the suburbs of my own life, both literally, as a lifelong Londoner, and psychologically, as someone who had got themselves stuck in isolation and ever decreasing circles of interaction. Reading John Cacioppo’s seminal book on Loneliness [Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection] after making the show made me realize that what I describe in the show is what happens to a human ape when they are confronted with enduring loneliness.”
