In the civic imagination, a balcony suggests authority: a ruler greeting the crowd, a politician delivering promises, a monarch acknowledging applause. In Why I am and why I am not, the balcony of the old town hall becomes something else entirely. It becomes a place for ordinary declaration.
The performance, created by the Manchester-based theatre collective Quarantine, unfolds as a two-part public encounter. The first half, The Balcony, begins outdoors. From the façade of Battersea Arts Centre, which was once Battersea Town Hall, twelve individuals step forward to address the gathered crowd. Each begins with the same simple phrase: “Why I Am” or “Why I Am Not.”
The format draws deliberate inspiration from a moment in the building’s history: the philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered his controversial lecture Why I Am Not a Christian here in 1927. The echo is less historical reenactment than provocation. Russell’s polemic becomes a structural prompt for a contemporary chorus of voices.
The speakers themselves are intentionally varied: a child, a professional speechmaker, a newcomer to the area and others from different walks of life. Each approaches the formula differently. Some statements feel philosophical, others personal, occasionally playful. What emerges is not a debate but a small civic ritual; an improvised parliament of identity, belief and refusal.
If the balcony offers proclamation, the second part—The Rooms, offers intimacy. Inside the labyrinthine interior of the building, audiences wander through spaces where the speakers can be encountered again. Away from the elevated platform, the rhetoric softens. The formal speech gives way to conversation. Public identity, so confidently projected from above, becomes something more tentative and complicated in private rooms.
The piece forms part of A Public Address, a wider programme in which Quarantine take over the former town hall to explore a deceptively simple question: who gets heard in a place like this today? The architecture carries its own memory of authority. The performance quietly reassigns that authority to the people standing on the balcony.
The creative team reflects the project’s clarity of concept. The work is conceived and created by Richard Gregory, with design by Simon Banham, produced by Kevin Jamieson and supported in speech writing by Sonia Hughes. British Sign Language interpretation is provided by Katie Fenwick, extending the event’s commitment to accessibility.
Taken together, the weekend becomes less a performance than a portrait: a meditation on the distance between the self we declare in public and the self that emerges in conversation. The balcony promises certainty; the rooms reveal its edges.
Why I am and why I am not ran from 6th-8th March at Battersea Arts Centre.