Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

theatre
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Annoying the Neighbours
‘Some people really push the boundaries’
“I started hearing this buzzing sound late at night,
which kind of got worse as the night went on,” says
Louise Wallinger. She thought it was some kind of
electrical or mechanical fault in the building. But
this was a block of flats with “quite a few anti-social
behaviour problems”, and when people from the
local council came round, they thought someone
might have been making the noise on purpose.
“They offered to send a professional witness, who
would sit in my flat at night and try and work out
what it was.” This gave Wallinger an idea.
She works in the field of verbatim theatre, in which
plays are constructed from the edited text of interviews.
So she decided to talk to people whose job it
was to deal with neighbour issues; and to interview
normal people about their neighbours.
“I don’t think I’ve had a performance yet where
someone hasn’t been telling me about their neighbours
afterwards. It is something that people can
really relate to. Because, partly, it’s about diplomacy,
and the things we have to do in order to live next
door to people.
“I found that some people will really push the
boundaries, and it’s quite amazing what other
people put up with in order to still kind of rub
along with their neighbours.
One story involves a woman who had been unexpectedly
at home, naked: it was a bad time to find
out that her neighbour had been using their spare
key to let themselves in. “But she never actually
asked for the key back, because she says it would
have been so embarrassing.
“There’s another woman whose neighbour just
comes round and sits in her garden, just outside her
living room window, to smoke a fag. At first, she
tried to get her to stop, then just started to live with
it, in the hope that she went away. So it seems that
there are people who haven’t quite learnt the rules
of how to get along.”
Other neighbours are intentionally obnoxious: she
was told about a guy “who sellotaped about 20 different
alarm clocks to his ceiling, to go off at different
times during the day, to annoy the neighbours,
and left Westlife playing on repeat all day.”
“I think problems with neighbours can really blight
people’s lives,” Wallinger says. And yet, lots of the
stories in Annoying the Neighbours are funny. “Or
even if they weren’t funny to start with, with the
passage of time, people are seeing the humour in
them. So some of it is quite serious, but a lot of it
does come across in quite a humorous way.”
As for her own problem, Wallinger never actually
had to call in a professional witness. She discovered
the noise was caused by a faulty light on the outside
of the building. She no longer lives there, by the
way – and, in answer to the inevitable question, she
says her current neighbours are “all very nice”. SR
Annoying the Neighbours, in a double bill with Martin
Stewart’s play Pyramids of Margate, Sat 11 April,
Otherplace at the Basement, 8pm
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