I sat down with writer and Artistic Director of Highly Sprung Mark Worth to find out more about SIMILE coming to Jacksons Lane this November.
Can you tell me a little about your show and what audiences can expect?
Simile, written by Mark Worth and Jasmine Gardosi, former Birmingham Poet Laureate, follows 3 teenagers 12 hours before their English Literature exam. Blending poetry, physical theatre, dance and spoken word, Simile is Highly Sprung’s new and topical exploration of identity and friendships aimed at audiences of 13–16 year olds.
As three friends sit down to revise the night before their GCSE poetry exam, their minds are everywhere. One is being trolled online, another’s struggling to hold it together, and the third is just trying to make sense of it all. But as the night unfolds, a dark secret that binds them begins to surface—revealing a story about friendship, identity, and the power of words.
Simile is a bold new performance created for young people, by young people, and performed by Highly Sprung professionals. Inspired by the Worlds and Lives GCSE poetry anthology, it explores what it means to grow up today; in a world of chaos, connections, and constant change it underscores personal struggles with pervasive social media, from smartphone addiction to trolling and toxic masculinity.
Simile captures the excitement, fear, hope, and uncertainty of becoming who you are. Because when it’s just you, a pen, and a poem—you have to decide what your story will be.
What drew you to this specific story?
Highly Sprung have a rich history of working with and alongside children and young people; we have seen a clear change in the young people over the past 25 years; their struggles with mental health, smartphone addiction and a battle over identity—who they are, who they have to be to please others such as parents, teachers, peers and, often more critical for them, how they are seen online.
This internal battle so often happens at the most stressful of times, where they are expected to retain information from 11 different subjects and have that knowledge tested and rated following a 90 minute exam. For the English Literature exam alone 15 different poems need to be memorised and understood, poems that range from the modern to over 200 years ago.
Working with our Co-creators, a group of 10 young people (13–16 yrs) they identified Poetry as the hardest of the GCSE elements as the language made little sense to them, why would abstract metaphorical language speak to the very literal and ‘instant capture’ culture generated by TikTok?
What has been the biggest challenge in bringing this production to life?
We wanted to make the piece authentic and rooted in the culture of real young people. As part of this creation and Highly Sprung’s ongoing development of young artists, we created the Co-Creators group, a team of 10 young people from different backgrounds who worked alongside the production team; they became directors, choreographers, writers, designers.
“16 year olds wouldn’t say that”
“That’s not how you hold a phone”
“If that happened to me I’d…”
It opened new doors to us as creatives as we were able to have immediate access to young voices and opinions but in turn, it left the professional creatives open to real critique.
How does the design of your show (set, sound, or lighting) impact the presentation of your story?
The set comprises boxes of different sizes; a nod to the poetry used in the piece about social media:
“So I post,
post after post sitting like cattle in grids
and the tapping and buzzing
and the filters and the fitting inside the box.
The tick tick ticking of the clock and the clock winds down and the data runs out,
phones down please, but now they pick their phones up
and get tapping and liking and judging me,
putting me down and calling me thick
unless I tick
inside their box.
Think inside their box.
Live inside their box.
Everything is a box”
The backdrop becomes the phone screen with a constant reminder that the exam is edging closer with a timer counting down.
For Simile, Highly Sprung worked with Midlands based Composer Tom Haines who has designed the show’s soundtrack with the young people in mind. Alerts, swipes, pings and notifications, that make up much of a young person’s world, combine in a high energy jazz inspired soundtrack that starts the show with comfort and ease but slowly transforms into a claustrophobic denseness that mirrors the characters’ inner turmoil as they are trolled by a local influencer.
If you could sum up the show in one word or phrase, what would it be and why?
One teacher described Simile as: “The show that every student, teacher, and the DFE should see; this is an example of the lives of our young people and the pressures we put on them.”
For us: Simile is a story of its time. A unique perspective on the culture we have created for young people and the dangers we all face in understanding our own identity both in the real world and online.
SIMILE runs at Jacksons Lane, London, on 17 November. Tickets available at https://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/events/similie-highly-sprung/
