A faulty light inspires Louise Wallinger’s new noisy neighbour show

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

Louise Wallinger

Louise Wallinger will star in a one-woman show about noisy neighbours at the Face to Face Festival in south London next month.

All 20 characters, from council officers to nuisances, will be played by Wallinger in the verbatim piece, Annoying the Neighbours. Among the real-life characters is a person who played a single Westlife song on repeat all day long and another who taped dozens of alarm clocks to his ceiling to annoy his upstairs neighbour. Wallinger was inspired when an incessant buzzing in her London home led her to call the noisebusters.

“After a lot of hoo-ha, it turned out to be a light that was on the blink. They had thought there might be a sweatshop in the building so it was a bit of an anti-climax.”

Wallinger started out working on real-life dramas with London Road creator Alecky Blythe. Her last solo show, Cut Me and I Bleed Elvis, about obsessive collectors was made into a Radio 4 play in 2005. Does she plan to work with older brother, the Turner Prize winning artist, Mark? “We’d probably want to keep our work separate. I don’t know what we could do, really.”

Wanted: extra nerds for an IT Crowd one-off

Fancy appearing in The IT Crowd with Chris O’Dowd? The nerd-com, which finished in 2010, returns for a one-off special later this year.

Last week, its creator Graham Linehan put out a rather specific call for extras. Fans are asked to send shots of themselves standing near famous landmarks and looking at “something really gross” on their laptops or phones, to TheItCrowd@retort.tv.

“You will not be paid”, warns creator Graham Linehan. “There is no money.” Thank heavens for crowd-funding.

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