Ghosts on a wire
Ghosts on a Wire is the second play in a series commissioned by Southwark Council’s Blackfriars Stories. Like its predecessor Albion in Flames, the play was written by Linda Wilkinson based on my research and set designs.
Set across the 19th century, Ghosts on a Wire tracks the emerging invention of electricity and its industrial development on the shores of London’s Bankside. The play begins with a reading of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in the once famous Leverian Museum on Blackfriars Road, close by the abandoned Albion flour mill. Her book appears at the time when electricity was becoming a tantalising but dangerous reality – championed by the rich and powerful and denigrated by others whose lives might be blighted by its unregulated development. In the face of this, one special woman, Octavia Hill, fought for the right for ordinary people of Southwark to have clean air and decent housing.
As the source of Mary Shelly’s supernatural themes, electricity became a true force for power by the turn of the 19th century. Ghosts on a Wire recounts a tale of unworldly events, corruption, greed and resilience in the face of the leviathan (Bankside Power Station) that was able to consume everything it encountered.
