Lostlings

Lostlings was Almeida Projects' third three week collaboration with AS Drama students from City and Islington Sixth Form College.  Led by the director Alan Lane, the musical director Jonathan Williams, actors Curtis Jordan and Debbie Korley and composer Mike Henry, the students were asked to explore the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, the twins in the Almeida Opera, The Silent Twins by April de Angelis and Errollyn Wallen, based on the book by Marjorie Wallace.

Two black girl twins are born on a drab Welsh military base.  

Jennifer and June are children of a family who are keen to be respectable and fade into the bleak background. The twins refuse to speak. They do however make birds sounds to each other. They develop a secret language of gesture and sound. No-one can understand them. 

This strategy later begins to trap and distort the lives of the twins. In an effort to break out of the mediocrity of their surroundings they make a bid to become novelists. They read widely including classic authors. Their writing is bold and adventurous - it gets them nowhere.  

They experiment with boys - whatever they are searching for - love, acceptance, a thrilling life - they do not find it - they set fire to a local school one night. They are caught.  

Their silence condemns them and they are sent to Broadmoor where, as June writes in one of her poems, they are like "flowers in hell". They languish there for ten years. 

Their story is in essence one of two young girls trying to form a creative identity for themselves but being forced in the end to conform to stereotypes of being "black and daft", as the twins put it.  

Their poetry and writing, however, transcends the despair of their circumstances.