The Opposite of Distance, Camden People’s Theatre
It’s the last day of our Camden Fringe 2025 interview series, and safe to say we made it to our target of 100. So we do hope you’ve been tempted into booking up to see a show or two because of them. If so, you can find all the interviews here and you can see just what else is playing now at the festival here.
Camden Fringe has always been a place for new creatives to get their first professional experience, but that’s not to say it doesn’t also attract those with a little more experience under their belts. Paper People Theatre, made up of Lowri Jones, Jake Walton and Hanna Mook, fall into that “more experienced” category, having formed way back in 2012. After a six-year break they are back with The Opposite of Distance, which will be coming to Camden People’s Theatre on 23 and 24 August, tickets here.
We caught up with the team to ask what they have planned for their return to Camden.
What can audiences expect from the show?
We as a company are driven by the creative needs and frustrations of the theatre world and look to our surroundings for inspiration, drawing on natural geological formations, analysing how their fragile beauty is affected by time. Through this piece we question how we as a company can come back after a six-year hiatus to this landscape of a theatre scene that has long forgotten us and how to support emerging work?
Using striking visuals, physical theatre, and frank conversations the show grows from a beautiful geology lesson into reflections on what draws us as theatre-makers to a moneyless stage.
The audience will watch us cocoon ourselves in fabric and dance our way out, precariously stack chairs while monologuing about shows gone by and drag each other’s lifeless body around the stage.
Is Camden Fringe going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
We will have performed first at Greater Manchester Fringe festival as part of a mini-tour of fringe venues to launch this piece of work.
We are excited to perform at the Camden Fringe and Greater Manchester Fringe because these festivals represent our home locations; London for Jake, and the North for Lowri and Mook. Jake’s practice is rooted in London, and Camden People’s Theatre has been a special place for us, as it hosted one of our first professional performances as a company for an ACE-funded show. It’s a venue close to our hearts.
After six years, we’re relaunching our careers and see these fringe festivals as the perfect space to experiment with how we work together. We want to explore what we can create in an environment that encourages growth, collaboration, and feedback from a diverse range of audiences and fellow creators. Fringe festivals are exactly the kind of vibrant, supportive space where we can take risks, learn, and develop our craft.
What brought you all together?
We have actually known each other for over 15 years now. We all met initially in University and formed Paper People Theatre in 2012. We have worked with a few different collaborators in our time but the core of us are still here! We are actually at a critical point in our career, having had a hiatus for around six years instigated by the pandemic. We all continued working on separate projects and Jake went to RADA, but we always knew we wanted to perform together again so we have finally made it happen!
Being a fringe festival, we all know sets have to be bare minimum, how have you got around this with your set and props?
This is such a great question for us because we notoriously love props! However working this way is a challenge we needed! Before even making this piece of work we decided in this new era of PPT, we wanted to keep things a little more simple and tourable… we have still managed to include 20 chairs in the piece… but honestly for us, that is really lightweight!
We tend to choose one or two key versatile props and see how we can utilise them in the most imaginative ways, and that is how we have worked this time to keep props to a minimum, but making them as impactful as we can.
How important is audience interaction to you?
As our piece is contemporary and a mix of performance art and physical theatre, there are elements where we are interacting directly with the audience. So their involvement is so key. The audience bring and can often dictate the energy of the piece, but honestly it is up to them how they react, as long as they feel they can do so without reserve, it is all good interaction. We do want people to feel free to laugh at any point, as there are some really silly bits! Just because something has the word ‘contemporary’ in it, doesn’t mean it is taking itself too seriously!
Are there any plans for what comes next after the show has finished its run – for you or the show?
We hope to be able to complete another few weeks of R&D following feedback from the fringe, then definitely back to touring. Nothing booked in yet but it will all be on our social media and our website when we do.
If your show had a soundtrack what songs would definitely be on it?
Anything by Rosemary Clooney – Her music is honestly a Paper People Staple.
What is the weirdest or most unconventional prop used in your show?
Not sure if it is unconventional but we use a dripping cloth as a prop in our show. It is the simplest of props but actually provides the soundscape for the whole show and is interacted with throughout the performance. So for something so small, it has a bit impact!
If budget or reality was not an issue, what’s the one piece of scenery/set you’d love to have in your show?
If budget were no issue for this project, we would love to create an immersive environment where water drips from all the walls, gradually increasing in volume to build tension and atmosphere.
Or a massive fabric that pours over us, enveloping the space and adding a sense of fluidity and movement. Alternatively, we might fill the set with chairs, using them as a shifting landscape to interact with; jumping from them, hiding in them, or rearranging them to create different spaces and dynamics. All of these props would add an element of playfulness and versatility, allowing us to transform the environment in real-time.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received during your career, and how has it influenced your work on this show?
We as a company have received a lot of great advice, guidance and support throughout the years, but one that has really changed the way we work in this new stage of our career is that everything has already been done once, so don’t worry about it. Make work that speaks to you in the language you understand and can communicate, it doesn’t matter if it’s been done before. That has really helped us relax a lot as more mature performers and stopped us agonising over how fresh or original our work was and care more about whether we liked it and we believed in it.
Thanks to Lowri, Jake and Hanna for finding time to chat. The Opposite of Distance plays at Camden People’s Theatre on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 August.
