A New Play: 'We Never Get Off at Sloane Square'

UPDATE: OCTOBER 2021

Thanks to our generous donors, we are so close to getting our show on! Rehearsal and performance venues booked! Actors contracted! Parent & baby performance planned! We just need a little bit more money to help us get over the finish line.

So we are partnering with Fill Bakery, a London small business dedicated to battling food poverty and creating vegan treats, for our ONLINE BAKE SALE!

"I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental. What we needed was not a hero to worship but money. If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes." - 'The Last Samurai', Helen DeWitt

Our Play

Raised in poverty by a depressed single mother, Ludo is convinced he can solve all their problems, if only he can find his father. His epic quest takes him from East London to the Arctic Circle, from mediaeval Japan to the depths of his mother's sadness, all without ever getting off the Circle Line. Based on Vulture's book of the century 'The Last Samurai', 'We Never Get Off at Sloane Square' is a smart and hopeful play, set simultaneously in 1990s London and inside the mind of an extraordinary child.

The Story So Far

• Book Release 2001: Helen DeWitt's novel 'The Last Samurai' is released. A fifteen-year-old borrows it from her friend to read on a plane. This is the first of about twenty times she will read this book over the coming years.
• Rights Agreement 2017: The fifteen-year-old, now grownup actor and playwright Amy Garner Buchanan, graduates from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She procures theatrical adaptation rights from Helen DeWitt. 
• Rehearsed Reading 2018: Amy, a team of actors, a director and a dramaturg stage a rehearsed reading of 'We Never Off at Sloane Square' at The Pear Tree pub in West London. The audience laughs, loves it and has to move inside when it starts raining like billy-o. 
• Script Accelerator 2018: The team participate in four weeks' rehearsal and development at the Park Theatre, culminating in a public showing of the first twenty minutes of the play. Positive and constructive feedback abounds. We begin to plan for the future. 
• Funding Freeze 2020: Producer Niall Dingle diligently works on several successive funding applications in order to set up further rehearsal and development periods. The last of these is cancelled when a little thing called COVID-19 brings the arts industry to its knees.
• Sloane Square Project 2021: The story of a depressed mum stuck at home with her child has a new resonance. Amy and actors Lewis and Charlie form the Sloane Square Project, with the dual aims of supporting stressed-out parents and producing the play in Autumn 2021.

Community Engagement

We want to connect with the people our play is about. The mental health charity Mind is partnering with us, and during lockdown we released The Sanity Download, a weekly newsletter detailing mental health and parenting resources. Our performance run includes a parent & baby matinee so parents are not excluded from seeing great theatre.

Reviews

We are so proud of this play, and others who have seen it so far agree. For example, film industry professional Evelyn Xing (who reads a lot of bad scripts for a living) says: "Just like DeWitt's novel, Amy brings us a theatre project awe-inspiring in content and truly innovative in form. At the staged reading, the genius characters, quick-fire dialogue, and mind-bending structure effortlessly dazzled, flirting with the audience's expectations and challenging our perspectives on life, on the world, and on ourselves."

Amy and Hayley's work has been reviewed elsewhere (for their 2019 production 'Bruised Fruit', ****) as "a robust and effective collaboration...both Buchanan and Ricketson have a keen eye and ear for the power of storytelling". We are confident in our team's ability to do justice to this story!