Writer/director Şule Selin Çiçek brings her show, CLOUDS, to Lambeth Fringe this year.
“CLOUDS is an act of witnessing. Two figures share a stage: one speaks, one listens. Neither fully knows what they’re searching for — but something is shifting between them. Some things are shouted, others left unspoken. It all unfolds into something irreversible.
A thread connects each body to a cloud. But not all clouds behave the same.”
Where: Bread & Roses Theatre
When: 6 Oct
Ticket link: https://lambethfringe.com/events/clouds
What inspired the creation of CLOUDS, and how did it develop into the show you are now presenting?
CLOUDS began as a short story written for Compass Collective’s VoiceNotes project, which was putting together an anthology with refugee writers and later published as Hold to Record: Voice Notes from Refugees.
I only had one night to write it because at the time I was performing in another production. For weeks I had been turning over ideas in my head, I knew I wanted to write, but nothing felt right.
I realised I wanted to write something that felt real for me as a new writer, but also for anyone who might read it.
On that night, I asked myself a simple but difficult question: what is the real thing I know? What is present in my life, what is the problem I keep seeing around me?
So I thought about my own family and people close to me, the relationships I grew up around, the struggles, silences, and acts of love I had witnessed.
It is, in many ways, a very personal story for me; drawn from what I have lived through and what I have seen in those around me and how it always makes me feel.
From that, the image of the cloud appeared almost suddenly, and the story unfolded.
It became a way to hold together my personal memories, the stories I had absorbed from those close to me, and the wider criticisms I had long carried about the system we live in.
At its heart, it is a love story; but one marked by absence, by migration, and by the ways communities respond to grief and difference.
When I wrote it, I also imagined the audience: would they listen with care, or would they turn away, distracted, uneasy? That tension between a fragile story and a restless audience shaped the voice of the Watcher, and later became central to the play.
What started as one night’s writing for an anthology has grown into a piece that continues to ask me, and now the audience, what it really means to tell and to listen?
Why should audiences come along to the show, and what might they expect?
If audiences are looking for something new and different, then they should definitely come. I can’t claim to be too bold, this is my first play and the first time I’ve tried something like this so I don’t want to make big promises.
But what I can say is that it’s a story rooted in truth, drawn from real experiences. During rehearsals, the honesty of the story has deeply shaken my team, and that has given us faith in sharing it.
If audiences want to be taken on a journey; to see the inner face of love, to witness how systems can seem to affect a single person’s life, but in fact affects everyone around them, changing our very nature, and to feel how their own reactions shape the experience in the moment, then they should come.
At its core, it’s just a simple story. We’ll sit together and share it. I don’t think it will overwhelm them; instead, I hope we’ll imagine together, grieve together, and be surprised together.
Do you find fringe festivals inspiring?
Absolutely. I come from Turkey, where there isn’t really a tradition of fringe festivals. Instead, we have municipal theatres, which have their own ensembles and offer strong work, but in some ways the system can feel limiting.
Not every actor can easily find a place or produce their own work. What I’ve found here is that the fringe, and the spirit of the fringe creates its own ecosystem.
It’s a space where people support each other, and in that ecosystem someone like me, who is just starting out, can begin to find a voice, to find an audience. That feels both unique and vital.
Rather than waiting for approval from big theatre institutions, the fringe gives you the chance to try, to experiment, to put something into the world and see how it resonates.
Of course everything costs money, especially in this field, but the fringe still offers a more sustainable way to make a first attempt, to test yourself, and to grow.
As someone who studied literature, I’ve always known that writing and presenting a story to an audience are completely different experiences.
Seeing how words live in performance and how audiences respond to them shapes the work in real time.
It shapes you as an artist too, helping you find not only your voice but also the kind of artist you want to become.
That process isn’t separate from the audience, it happens with them, in the same space, in the same spirit of community.
I think many of us begin here: fringe festivals are where a lot of writers, directors, and performers are born through trial and discovery.
What’s next for the show?
Since this is my first play as a writer and a director, I see this version very much as the beginning, a first step and also a kind of a R&D process.
This will be the first time it meets an audience, and I’m eager to gather as much feedback as I can. With that feedback, I plan to continue developing the play further.
Looking ahead, I hope to stage CLOUDS at other festivals and on different platforms. I imagine it as an organic process, one that grows together with the audience each time it is performed.
Afterwards, I want to take some time to reflect on the impact it has had, to consider what else could be added or reshaped, and then discuss with my producer where we might take it next.
So while Lambeth Fringe will be its first home, I don’t see it as the end. I believe this play has a longer journey ahead, and I hope audiences will be able to encounter it again in different spaces and festivals in the future.