The Secret Project

‘The SECRET project is genuinely innovative in its pairing of untold stories with artists and playwrights; it promises to make the past we didn’t know about an event that shapes the future, and offers writers, artists and audiences a really seductive challenge. 

 Steve Waters, playwright

Every year the government releases 30 year-old secret documents from the National Archive in Kew.

We decided to get creative about investigating what has been hidden from us and why.

SECRET is a new work programme and touring show that visits secret locations in cities, inviting audiences on a self-led journey through an archive room into a redacted world where a site-specific adventure for curious audiences with enquiring minds awaits.

SECRET is currently in development. Further details will be posted in due course but until then – you guessed it – it’s secret!

‘Theatres are spaces to reveal secrets. That’s why they work best in the dark. We go to the theatre to find out secrets of family lives and love affairs and murky pasts and broken promises. The remarkable SECRET project takes that gesture of revelation and thrusts it to the front of the stage and the front of the country’s recent political history. It is a space in which artists will get to reveal secrets about the very way in which our country has been run. I can’t wait to see how it will flourish and what we will find out.’

Simon Stephens, playwright