Factories have been working overtime in my mind of late. As the Herald’s theatre critic, I recently watched the National Theatre of Scotland and the Tron Theatre’s production of Frances Poet’s new play, Stand & Deliver, take a musical look at the 1981 sit-in at Greenock’s Lee jeans factory. A week later, I saw Sweat, the Citizens Theatre Glasgow and Royal Lyceum Edinburgh’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 play about what happens to a mid American steel town when the plug is pulled on the factory that gave that town its economic lifeblood.
My more personal interest in factories just now is to do with The Machine Stops. This is a project I'm part of that is set to take place as part of Hidden Door, the grassroots Edinburgh arts festival that takes over abandoned buildings and transforms them into unique temporary venues.
This year’s Hidden Door returns to The Paper Factory, the vast former cardboard packaging plant close to Edinburgh Airport. Over five days and nights, the Paper Factory will host an extravaganza of live music, spoken word and visual art. With the venue having already hosted Hidden Door 2025, this year’s event is subtitled The Last Shift. This is partly in honour of the building’s long life as a working factory up until its closure in 2023. It also marks Hidden Door’s final intervention into the building prior to its forthcoming demolition. This is where The Machine Stops comes in.
The roots of The Machine Stops stem from Hidden Door director Hazel Johnson and visual art curator, Jill Martin Boualaxai asking me to get involved with the festival. I presumed they wanted me to suggest a few bands. As it turned out, and despite all attempts by me to wriggle out of it, I ended up taking part in a workshop at the then untouched factory. It was a revelation.
The factory was littered with random chairs, stray safety boots, and locker rooms awash with personal effects and photographs. It was as if aliens had beamed up all human life, leaving behind a mess of industrial detritus.
Teamed with theatre director Eszter Marsalkóand composer Stephanie Lamprea, we worked up a locker room installation based around interviews I did with former factory workers, Jim Scott and Marlyn Price. Jim worked in the factory for more than thirty years, working his way up from manning the machines to a managerial position. Marlyn had a summer job there in 1969 prior to university. As part of the installation, recordings of our interviews could be heard on headphones. Watching people take the time to listen to Jim and Marlyn’s insights was a treat.
This year there seemed to be scope to do something more with the interviews. I proposed creating some kind of large-scale mash up that would utilise the interviews alongside other material. This includes phone footage of the factory before it was cleaned up, and a ton of photographs of the building in its raw state. I also knew there had to be live drumming, with other live elements including the Ghosts in the Machine, a performance from last year. Thus The Machine Stops was born.
The title comes from a 1909 short story by E.M. Forster that basically predicted the internet. A 1960s TV version for science fiction anthology series, Out of the Unknown, sometimes appears online. Who says irony is dead?
I also took inspiration from French film director Marguerite Duras’ 1976 work, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta (Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta). This was a follow up to Duras’ previous film, India Song, a languid study of a clapped out diplomatic class filmed in a mansion just outside Paris. Duras’ sequel revisited the now empty mansion, as a camera trailed its slow way from room to derelict room. This was set against India Song’s full soundtrack, including dialogue to create a haunting sense memory montage of the house’s recent past and the ghosts that lingered.
I also looked to maverick Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary, The Idea of North. This and two follow-up works fused voices and environmental sounds to evoke a sense of place in a form that would now likely be called sound art. Also in my mind was artist Jeremy Deller’s description of rave culture’s takeover of abandoned factories in the 1980s as a wake for the industrial revolution.
While this mess of ideas and influences exists in my head, as a confirmed luddite, I am clueless about how to make any of this happen. Fortunately, I have been teamed this year with a new set of geniuses. This comes in the form of ace digital projection mapping guru Tom Flint, plus the Sativa Drummers, veterans of percussive interventions on Edinburgh’s club scene for several decades.
The first thing I see when I go to Tom’s office is a poster on the wall for ESTATE. This was former KLF auteur Jimmy Cauty’s touring roadshow that featured a scale model of a dystopian village in the back of a shipping container. I worked on the Edinburgh leg, hosting it in the car park of North Edinburgh Arts.
I mention E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to Tom, and he leaves his office to retrieve a piece of work by one of his students. This is a bespoke publication that reproduces Forster’s story accompanied by assorted QR codes that prompt various interactive exchanges with the reader. A few days later, Cam, one of the Sativa Drummers, turns up on site with a book of Forster short stories containing The Machine Stops that he picked up in a charity shop. Synchronicity reigneth.
As the Paper Factory is gradually transformed, I start to think about radical theatre director Joan Littlewood’s 1961 proposal to build what she called a ‘Fun Palace’ on London’s South Bank. I also think about artist Bruce McLean’s similarly unfulfilled proposals to transform Argyle Street in Glasgow with features that included a light-up catwalk, an Irn Bru bar and a Tunnock’s Tower.
The Machine Stops is part of something similarly playful, with Hidden Door’s Last Shift concept forming one great big monster sized spectacle. If he was still around, German conceptualist Joseph Beuys might call it social sculpture.
While I have never worked in a factory, my mum did. When we were kids she worked the night shift at Sayer’s cake factory in Liverpool, then later at Schweppes bottling plant. With Schweppes officially Cadbury Schweppes at the time, we got to ruin our teeth on cut price chocolate and soft drinks from the factory seconds shop while my mum did the hard labour.
In this sense, while we create our fun palace, the real heroes and heroines of The Last Shift and The Machine Stops are Jim and Marlyn and everybody who worked in the factory and other factories like them. They got their hands dirty in a way we can only speculate about while guzzling our fizzy drinks.
While the different elements of The Machine Stops will be put together over the next few days, the nuts and bolts are more or less in place, and the Sativa Drummers are making a beautiful noise. Beyond that, I have no idea how things will work out. All I know is that on the Hidden Door production line, there is work to be done.
The Machine Stops forms part of The Last Shift at Hidden Door 2026, The Paper Factory, Turnhouse Road, Edinburgh, 3-7 June.
The Herald, May 28th 2026
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