Precipice has been the result of a rare and special collaborative process, enabled by New Diorama Theatre and Intervention 01. Six writers spent 50 days together over the course of two years working in a way that took inspiration from both a TV writers’ room and a band rehearsal in order to make a new musical that diversified both process and product. The institutional support we received from NDT allowed us to discover and trust a process where collective imagination shaped every moment, a process that no individual artist could ever have generated alone. In Precipice, no single idea, lyric, or bar of music can be attributed to one author. This shared authorship method dismantles the hierarchy that is usual in musical theatre writing, and returns it to its collaborative and interdisciplinary roots.

New musical theatre is rarely given permission to be strange, or formally audacious, or tonally unruly. Even when it is, that permission is often revoked mid-sentence, undermined by a deep cultural suspicion that musicals should stay in their nice, tidy box. A box labelled “entertainment/escapism,” with a note saying “don’t get too clever.”

Rarely are musicals encouraged to grapple with the state of the world, to take on the big issues of the day, or to wrestle with the contemporary moment we are living through. Particularly in the UK, that function is often reserved for plays alone. Here, musical theatre is still expected to please everyone before it can dare to challenge anyone.

This is regrettable, since musical theatre, at its best, is a medium that excels at distillation. It can hold several dimensions of thought at once: ideas, images, contradictions, all threaded with urgent emotional currents. Musicals can jump back and forward in time, reconcile the cosmic with the domestic, and wind together the political and the personal. As a form, musicals are uniquely equipped to take the world apart and put it back together.

For years I had envied the avant garde musical theatre culture that thrives in America, especially in New York at venues like Ars Nova, Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, and Lincoln Center. These are places where new musicals are respected as a legitimate artistic form, not a commercial product.

I founded Timelapse because I care deeply, almost embarrassingly, about formal innovation in musical theatre. Because I want to make shows that redefine what musicals can be: what they look like, what they sound like, what they are allowed to talk about, and the processes that are used to make them.

Before we had a plot, characters, or a location, Precipice began with a central research topic: The Doomsday Clock. This is an annually calibrated symbolic measure of how close human progress might be pushing the world toward manmade catastrophe. As an initial offer, I hoped the Clock might speak to ethical quandaries around science and technology, as well as framing the anxieties of living in a moment defined by enormous possibility and enormous risk. We found ourselves especially interested in what the present might look like from centuries in the future, and what those living through that future might make of our lives, our rituals, our ideas, and our choices.

Precipice is an attempt to push the form forward and to search for new creative territory. With it, we offer an argument for a musical theatre ecology that is allowed to grow, move, stretch, and change shape, instead of being confined to narrow expectations of form and genre. If we stop constraining the medium, it can become a site for genuine exploration, one where urgency and imagination are given equal room. This show is a small step in that direction, an invitation to expand what musical theatre can be.