A PUBLIC ADDRESS
BAC and Quarantine present four productions to create ‘A Public Address’ as part of Wandsworth’s London Borough of culture celebrations.
The full programme has been announced for A Public Address, award-winning Manchester theatre collective Quarantine’s takeover of BAC 16 Feb - 14 March 2026. Supported by Wandsworth Council as part of Wandsworth's year as The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture, Quarantine will collaborate with a huge range of people across Lavender Hill and the wider borough and offer audiences a rare insight into people’s lives and how they see the world.
Taking place around, throughout and from the balcony of BAC, A Public Address draws on Quarantine’s 27-year history of dismantling conventions and collaborating with all kinds of people. Across four strands, through intimate encounters and grand-scale durational performance, A Public Address builds a kaleidoscopic portrait of the people in Lavender Hill and beyond.
Using the building’s former role as a town hall as inspiration, once a site for radical politics, A Public Address will bring the people of Wandsworth together to ask: who gets heard in a place like this today?
The takeover will include a World Premiere of a new two-part work created especially for BAC, Why I am and why I am not. In the first part, entitled The Balcony, 12 people will make a speech to the public from the outside of BAC’s building – tackling subjects from the personal to the universal, the seemingly flippant to certainly urgent. The next day, the same people will be in conversation inside BAC in an installation of people entitled The Rooms, responding to the opposite starting point to whatever they chose to make their speech about.
On 14 March, Quarantine presents the London premiere of 12 Last Songs - an epic 12-hour durational work that invites people from across Wandsworth to work a paid shift on stage in an exploration of the place work has in our lives.
Throughout the two weeks, audiences can experience the London premiere of The people of Lavender Hill, (6 - 14 March), an audio walk, using their smartphones. The piece asks how we come to be somewhere, why we stay, and what it means to live side by side.
Taking place in cafes within a one-mile radius of BAC, Quarantine will bring their oldest and most intimate work - No Such Thing (16 Feb - 13 March), taking place between only two people, the offer is simple - Quarantine will buy you lunch whilst you have a conversation guided by a menu of questions.
For nearly three decades Quarantine has been making theatre that centres on conversations between ordinary people, creating circumstances for encounters between strangers. Each production is totally unique, made without actors – a form of mass portraiture, building fragmented pictures of people and the places they happen or choose to share.
Further Information: A Public Address | Battersea Arts Centre