Guest Blog: Playwright Nathan Ellis On NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU

I really like Matilda. The film, not the book. I watched it maybe a hundred times on VHS as a kid. I remember that scene where she looks at the glass and wants it to tip over and it doesn't, and I remember when the cheerios spill everywhere and I remember when Miss Honey looks over her glasses.

I just think it's a beautiful, colourful, amazing film. I can so vividly recall so many times when I sat in front of a glass and put my chin on the table and tried to get the glass to move. And then I can remember the feeling of having to give up, but there was some plausible world in which it would work.

This play is about that feeling: about the absurd, inane, overpowering powerlessness of that feeling.

No One Is Coming to Save You is about the will towards change and the inability to get anything to happen. It's about something coming from somewhere but having no idea where. It's also about Matilda (because honestly that film is just complete magic).

The play has been a collaboration with director Charlotte Fraser from the start. It has been made with Emilie Labourey and new company This Noise, along with maybe 30 brilliant people who we've had the good fortune to work with and talk to along the journey (about two years to this point).

I think most people talk about the theatre landscape not reflecting their experience. And I guess something we've noticed as a company is that artistic directors of theatres seem to programme a hella work about young people being either burning balls of anger or really sexy. A young person in today's culture is either pissed off or taking their clothes off.

Whereas a lot of what we've talked about as our experience of being in our early twenties in London right now is tiredness, disappointment, and precarity. And so NOCSY is a play that attempts to synthesise that feeling: the glass being about to tip over, or maybe there's just a breeze, or maybe an earthquake.

It's a play is about two people and one night in their lives. They can't sleep and they can't seem to feel either, but over one extraordinary event, they experience a connection. It plays with ambiguity and possibility and we hope it asks new questions in a new way.

It has a few forebears: Chris Thorpe, Forced Entertainment, Lulu Raczka.

I think it's not a coincidence that I admire work by collaborative artists - effing hell, the best bit of this has been the collaboration. The actors, Rudolphe Mdlongwa and Agatha Elwes, and the creative team are incredible.

It is also attempting, like those artists, towards a piece that leaves you thinking and feeling. It's a pretty big experiment in joining those two impulses and I can't wait for an audience to tear it apart and tell us what it's really about.

Oh, and there are four or five middling to good jokes.

No One Is Coming to Save You runs 11 June-7 July as part of The Bunker's Breaking Out Festival

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