Ghost Ward

St Andrews-by-Bow Hospital, London

May 2001

Taken by bus from the Almeida’s base at Kings Cross, the audience travelled to the heart of the East End and the abandoned ward spaces of St Andrew’s Hospital in Bow. A promenade production brought to life by a company of professional artists and 20 young people from the Kings Cross area, Ghost Ward explored the hopes and fears of young lives. The production was inspired by interviews with children in hospitals, their parents, doctors and nurses, and drew upon a range of texts dealing with mortality.

Susannah Clapp, The Observer

The Almeida is stretching out from Kings Cross and away from tailored plays, under the direction of the talented young Ben Harrison.

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

The experience is fleeting, fragmentary and mysterious. . .it has a wonderful element of surprise and an unaffected intimacy. It is like eavesdropping on real people’s lives and is, at times, unbearably moving, not least because the children involved-all from local schools-treat the whole thing like a huge, crucially important game. Ghost Ward plays with our concept of what theatre can be.