Songs to Love and Browse by: the Sound of ‘Shopping Centre Paradise’.

Playwright Laura Rubio Galletero, director Sibylla Archdale Kalid, and translator Rachel Toogood

As the 2021 Out of the Wings Festival approaches, our teams are busy preparing our readings of UK premiere English translations.  The team behind ‘Shopping Centre Paradise’ have also been busy putting together a playlist inspired by this contemporary play exploring love in the age of consumerism, and have shared it with us here.

This playlist has been compiled by the play’s writer, Laura Rubio Galletero, its translator Rachel Toogood and the reading’s director, Sibylla Archdale Kalid. 

Each person put together their list with a slightly different focus. 

Laura’s list is made up of songs that she listened to whilst writing the play, they are songs that create part of its atmosphere. She selected some of the other songs because they are / were songs that her ex partner liked, (one of the factors that drove the creation of this text). The Nina Simone song reminds her of Eve and both her strength and vulnerability. Björk’s song connects her to Uriel’s message. 

Some of the songs Rachel chose are ones that immediately came to mind when thinking about the play, like There Must be an Angel and Adam and Eve, but others are more musings about characters and their feelings and are more related to the song’s lyrics, such as Lost Cause and Tender Blue. Others are just from a sensation that a particular scene gives her, like with Defying Gravity. 

Sibylla chose the songs on the basis of them instinctively ‘feeling’ like they belonged to the play; some of them have a quality of being tempted by another person or life (e.g. Little Something), some suggest the ersatz positivity of supermarket branding (Everybody’s Free) and others seem to suggest the idea of a lost or yet-to-be-discovered Eden (Under the Ivy). She also looked for songs that have the quality of tortured introspection or being emotionally stuck (Exile, In a Bind).

Since discovering the songs that Laura listened to whilst writing the play, Rachel has been listening to them whilst redrafting her translation. 

Listen to the whole playlist here:  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4mcCi6CoIwwLHKH8hWzTwe?si=41e7d64944cf4f24&nd=1

‘Shopping Centre Paradise’ by Laura Rubio Galletero, translated by Rachel Toogood and directed by Sibylla Archdale Kalid, July 15 at the Omnibus Theatre, London.  For tickets and further information, click here.

A rotten apple representing the play Shopping Centre Paradise