London Life Archive

…

 "The Paper Architect is a play combining paper-craft, animation, projection mapping and performance. It tells the story of an old model-maker who uses his paper creations as vessels for his imagination.

The show features tiny, accurately mapped animations playing across intricate paper sets: sunrises and sunsets come and go; flocks of birds pass by; leaves flutter from a tree... When the actor places a cut-out dancing woman on a detailed paper model, she comes alive; he adds a paper man and watches their romance unfold. The projected would-be lovers’ story is presented with a gentle humour; the life character, meanwhile, veers from rapt, childlike delight in his created world to a weary melancholy as the rigours of real life impinge."

★★★★ "It’s a show with a gossamer touch that leaves you shivering." Metro
★★★★ "What follows makes the jaw drop and the head whirl..."

The Times
★★★★ "The McGuire’s have created a world of trembling delicacy"

The Sunday Times
★★★★★ "A piece that speaks to our imagination and challenges our notions what theatre can be. A very inspiring forty-five minutes"

One Stop Arts

 ★★★★ “A quietly sad portrait of a man who has created a beautiful world that is too fragile to last.”  Playstosee

"The Paper Architect is as delicate as a poem by Keats, like someone pressing on a pressure point you didn’t know you had." The Londonist

Winner of the 2013 Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, co-produced by the Barbican with Create London and in association with the Tobacco Factory Theatre Bristol.

Trailer edit: Sarah Matthews

Music: Arvo Part, Spiegel im Spiegel